Solving the Communion Enigma

Solving the Communion Enigma

PART ONEThe Mystery

It has been a quarter of a century since I published Communion and the subsequent two follow-on books, Transformation and Breakthrough. These books described a series of experiences that I had between 1985 and 1994, conventionally known as “close encounters of the third kind” or “alien abductions.”

But are they what they seem?

After the last of these books was published, the experiences continued for a number of years, and left me with discoveries that take matters far beyond the conventional assumptions. There is an enormous phenomenon unfolding around us that involves UFO sightings, close encounters, crop circles, and physical effects ranging from the sublime to the terrifying. It is almost certainly the most complex thing that has ever happened, but because it is so hard to see in its vastness, few people realize how much it is actually impacting our lives and our world.

Individually, each part of the phenomenon is dismissed in a different way. UFOs are called cases of mistaken identity. And yet, in this book, I will analyze the sightings reported by one of NASA’s most honored engineers, who was a skilled professional observer of aircraft. “Alien abductions” are dismissed as folklore, and yet after writing Communion, I received hundreds of thousands of detailed accounts, meaning that millions of people have probably had the experience, given how many read the book, and the sensitivity of the subject. It is not folklore. It is part of human life. I will explore what it means. Crop formations are ridiculed as the work of drunks with boards on their feet. And yet some of them are spectacular mysteries.

In fact, every detail of the overall phenomenon is dismissed in some inadequate way, usually with contempt. But why? It’s not difficult to argue that it is a genuine mystery and, in fact, the greatest mystery known to man.

Exploring it in as objective a way as I have been able to, I have been led to what I feel are some engaging, if sobering, new speculations about the nature of man and our place in the universe. My discoveries have frightened me deeply, to be frank, but have also disclosed the promise of a glorious unknown that glows at once within us, and beckons us from afar.

I have struggled for twenty years to write this, a true sequel in the sense that it advances the ideas put forth in its predecessors, and doesn’t just extend their narrative.

The story I have to tell is so extremely complex and subtle and, above all, so profoundly strange that I have many times despaired of ever being able to write it. Can it be told well and usefully? I can record only what I have seen and what I have come to know about this lurid, bizarre, and wondrous experience, and be as truthful as I am able.


From SOLVING THE COMMUNION ENIGMA by Whitley Streiber. Published by arrangement with Tarcher, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Whitley Streiber, 2012.