Whitley Strieber

Whitley Strieber was an established horror novelist, author of The Wolfen (1978) and The Hunger (1981), both adapted into films, when his 1987 memoir Communion: A True Story recounted his own reported encounters with non-human beings at his upstate New York cabin beginning in 1985, including alleged hypnotic-regression-assisted recall of physical examination by small entities with large dark eyes. Communion became a multi-million-copy bestseller and a 1989 film starring Christopher Walken, and its unforgettable cover illustration of an alien face became arguably the single most recognizable visual image in modern UFO culture, cementing the 'Grey' as the default popular image of an alien far beyond what any government report or scientific case file had established. Strieber's literary background made him an unusually gifted narrator of subjective experience, and he has consistently resisted definitively labeling his encounters as extraterrestrial, describing them instead in more ambiguous, consciousness-oriented terms that draw skepticism from strict UFO researchers and interest from those studying the psychology and phenomenology of anomalous experience. He has written more than a dozen further books on his continuing encounters and hosts the long-running Dreamland podcast and radio program. Now in his eighties, Strieber remains an active, prolific voice in the field, notable for treating his own testimony with a degree of self-examining uncertainty rare among first-person abduction narrators.