Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is To Come [Hardcover]

Whitley Strieber (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 5, 2012

The bestselling author probes the ultimate significance behind today's increasing reports of UFOs, alien abductions, crop circles, and other unexplained phenomena-and what they mean for humanity's immediate future.

In 1987 writer Whitley Strieber exposed the world to the truth about alien abduction in his landmark memoir, Communion. For the first time in years, Strieber revisits his encounter with alien intelligences-but now dramatically widens his search to explore how "the visitors" connect with today's persistent and globe-spanning reports of anomalous phenomena, such as crop circles, cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, alien abductions, near-death experiences, close encounters, and unexplained bodily implants.

In his magisterial style, Strieber contextualizes these bizarre and unsettling reports with his own childhood memories of strange schools, sinister experiments, and family secrets. In exploring today's most convincing cases of unexplained phenomena, Strieber reasons that they are not unrelated events. Nor are they the result of mass delusion. In some of his most persuasive writing, Strieber argues that the wave of mysterious episodes marks a transition that humanity is undergoing right now. Against all conscious understanding, we are experiencing a broadened awareness of dimensions of reality that exist beyond our current perceptions.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Whitley Strieber is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty novels and nonfiction works, including The Wolfen, The Hunger, and The Coming Global Superstorm, which was made into the feature film The Day After Tomorrow. He lives in California.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher (January 5, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585429171
• ISBN-13: 978-1585429172
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #495,298 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 62 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars If you've read Communion... January 5, 2012

By Bean

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"What would the world be like without mysteries? It is a claustrophobic and desperate idea." This statement closes out the first section of the book and presents a core contrast between humans and the visitors, the intelligence that may or may not be an alien one. Our universe if full of mysteries, but the visitors' one is not. They've figured everything out...except us.

I've been a reader of Whitley's books since I was very young, and I've always been interested in the story Communion presented. I can still remember the alien face peering out at me from paperbacks lining the checkout lane at Osco. Many people have forgotten how big that book actually was. Somehow that subjective, tightly constructed non-fiction narrative of possible alien contact broke the barrier of mass awareness, but didn't create a wave of hysteria. Many people took it at face value, and then simply forgot about.

My recommendation is if you read Communion, you have to read this book.

There was not a lot of context in Communion. It was simply there and then gone, with some minimalist speculation in the last section. Now Whitley's had 25 years to pull things into focus and the things he's seen and researched in the intervening time are at the highest levels of intrigue.

From possible government experiments on children headed up by ex-Nazis in the late 1940's all the way to interactions with spirits of the dead during visitor encounters, you're going to get quite a lot of material to work with here. For a book of 200 plus pages it's quite dense.

When I was reading Transformation this week, the follow up to Communion, a friend of mine arrived and I showed him the book. He remarked, "Oh yeah this guy, you know he's a CIA shill." I found myself strangely defensive because my instincts have always said otherwise about Whitley. What would the CIA have to gain by using someone to publish the most coherent account of an alien abduction you can find in a library?

I feel like if there's any group pulling the strings on Mr. Strieber, it's the intelligence known as the visitors. Many people believe an alien presence would simply land somewhere and introduce themselves if they wanted to contact us. It's startling to think the actual contact is occurring on a personal level, in secret, but when you really contemplate that idea it makes the most sense. This is where Whitley comes in the picture for me. Contact was made in secret and then presented in public, for those who were ready to accept it. Communion was on the shelf and there for you to either pick it up or not. Luckily for the reader, we could be made aware of the presence without having to suffer the dire consequences of the real experience.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars 25 years of holding the question February 1, 2012

By Snorkledorf

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book shows us a man, having apparently experienced both trauma and truly unexplainable events, trying his best to make sense of his life. We see a nearly heroic effort to forge a positive, or at least forward-looking, interpretation of events that seem almost hopelessly overwhelming.

Throughout the Communion series of books, Strieber's core thinking has been consistent:

* Something very strange has happened to me, and it seems to be ongoing.
* I did my due diligence in checking whether it's all simply a psychological problem, the most likely option. The tests say I'm totally stable, if more than a bit stressed out.
* If that's the case, then what really is going on? It certainly seems important in any number of ways.
* I'm a writer, so I'll write about it.
* It seems to be far more complex than "Aliens in space ships." Way too many pieces just don't match up with that 1940's-era judgment.
* Okay, then let's avoid drawing any conclusions that would force us to dismiss big chunks of the evidence. However comfortable it'd be to have premature "certainty," we should try to keep the questions open.
* In the meantime, I'll do my best to find what personal meaning I can from the experience, and share this with my readers.

In some ways "Solving..." is more of the same, and this is not a bad thing. It gives new views of events we've read about in previous books while expanding upon them from the perspective of a quarter-century of experience.

Yet it also reveals new experiences, along with childhood memories that the author has only recently been able to assemble into a clear narrative. The core of the book is his unique way of looking at the way the world seems to have more than a single layer -- the cumulative result of his efforts to find clear meaning out of the strangeness he's been exposed to over the decades.

Strieber also makes use of his position as host of his radio program "Dreamland" to investigate other phenomena that may be related to his experiences, and ties them together as best as anyone could be expected to, being the slippery subjects that they are.

Throughout the book is a thread of long-resigned disappointment and sadness concerning the ease at which so many people seem willing to not only dismiss, but belittle and show raw unkindness toward those who dare to discuss these topics -- topics that have emerged as a new taboo in our society. Strieber has had this prejudice thrown in his face for the 25 years that he's been "out," and the reader both feels compassion for his treatment, and understanding for all those others who hesitate to make their own emergences from this particular closet. His frustration at seeing this reflexive attitude stifle investigation of what may be a situation that affects us all, is palpable.

If there's a part of his thinking that doesn't sit well with me, it would be his tendency to take everything very very seriously. And yet knowing the degree of trauma in his experiences, it's difficult to begrudge him this attitude. Although some of what he went through could be considered fascinating, or intriguing, or even sublime, his own lingering PTSD speaks a strong warning that caution is advised. The book is clear that while, "Yay, space brothers!" is a hopelessly reckless attitude, neither is pessimism an appropriate response.

As with the other books I've read from the author, the writing is engaging and vividly imaged. He's trying to explain what's basically unexplainable, which perhaps forces a balance between clarity of thought and depth of feeling. It's a good read.

Whether you have the mental flexibility to allow that this might be happening (physically or spiritually), or on the other hand you have the level-headedness to be confident that it's all simply psychological phenomena -- either way this book has value. It's a record of a man relatively isolated from his own home culture doing his best to come to terms with what he has perceived as his own experiences.

If you can take the true-believer glint out of your eyes, or the condescending sneer off of your lips, you can find here a record of somebody facing an overwhelmingly personal challenge, that we can all find useful in our own times of trial.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Aliens No More January 31, 2012

By Michael

Format:Hardcover

This book is very uneven. It gets off to an interesting start, suggesting (through a combination of personal experience and research) that childhood trauma is an important factor in what is known as the abduction phenomenon. After those initial chapters, however, the book unravels and continually digresses. It seemed like it was either written too quickly or that Whitley spent way too much time on it, I can't tell which. I was intrigued by a lot of Whitley's stories because they are so incredibly strange, but I couldn't identify any organizing principle. Sometimes I couldn't even understand what a sentence, paragraph, or chapter was about. One chapter, for example, was called "The Single Most Important UFO Case." The chapter tells about a number of UFO cases. I couldn't tell which one Whitley thought was "the most important" and why. A lot of aspects of this book lack that kind of fundamental clarity.

The ending returns to a denial iterated at the beginning of the book, which is that Whitley has never advocated a belief in aliens per se. I can appreciate that his thinking about this subject has evolved over the years, but to say that he NEVER advanced the idea of alien contact (as it's generally understood by most people) is really astounding. How can he say that he never advocated such an idea--that the people who have followed him over the last 20 odd years (truly odd years) are totally mistaken if they ever took his books to be about alien contact? As a devout reader of Whitley's UFO-related books (oops, there I go), I actually feel betrayed.

The true purpose of this book therefore becomes clear: Whitley was so traumatized by the controversies surrounding Communion and the related titles that he wants to "set the record straight" and distance himself as much as possible from the topic of aliens and UFOs, at least in an overly literal way. Whitley will never be able to do that, of course. In the public mind, he will always be linked to the topic of UFOS and aliens. And so his attempt to correct such a "misunderstanding" will inevitably lead to more frustration--both for him and for his devout followers. I wish that he could find some way of understanding this phenomenon and talking about it that isn't so alien-phobic. If even the legendary Whitley Strieber doesn't want to be associated with the topic anymore, what chance is there of people taking it seriously?

By the way, if you want to know what Whitley thinks the aliens REALLY are, you'll have to read the book. It has something to do with death and non-material entities, but I can't really summarize it.