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Q and A With Whitley Strieber “2012: The War For Souls” By Sean Casteel Whitley Strieber’s struggle to cope with the alien abductors he calls The Visitors has taken many literary and cinematic forms over the years, most recently in a novel called “2012: The War For Souls.” The new novel pits an archeologist named Martin Winters and a writer named Wylie Dale against a reptilian race of aliens bent on enslaving the human inhabitants of two Earths, each in its own parallel universe and with an ever-widening portal to doom opening up between them. The reptilian aliens have created a technology that can capture the human soul like a butterfly in a jar and feed on its memories and ties of love. The remaining shells of body and nervous system are then forced to walk en masse to a collection point in the north, nearly rendered zombies by the reptilians’ soul extraction process but still possessing a mindless spark of human life. Strieber has also thrown some interesting topical humor into the mix. For instance, the right wing television commentator Ann Coulter is revealed to have been a reptilian alien whose blonde good looks are the result of shape-shifting to disguise her true lizard-like appearance and predatory nature. “2012” has already been sold to Warner Brothers, to be filmed by the same production company behind the special effects extravaganza “Transformers,” while Strieber’s novel from last year, “The Grays,” is currently in production with Wolfgang Petersen directing. Petersen’s credits include “The Perfect Storm” with George Clooney and “In The Line Of Fire” with Clint Eastwood. We spoke to Strieber recently about “2012” and its place in his long list of fiction and nonfiction works. He has come to feel that his recent novels are a more direct path to the truth than any of his earlier nonfiction, “Communion” included. Strieber also says that he has come to regret publishing “Communion,” though he is consoled that the book was helpful to others who felt the encounter experience was pushing them over the edge. In Strieber they finally had a kindred spirit who had walked that same dangerous edge between one reality and the other, between knowing and not-knowing what was lurking just outside their dreams. So now, some twenty years after the number one success of “Communion,” we see a Whitley Strieber still seeking answers to some of the same questions he had in the beginning, having survived a primal terror undergone by him and numberless others whose source continues to elude any easy definition or even a basic understanding. Strieber may be right that the fictionalized approach to understanding the Visitors that he has taken over the last few years is the most efficient way to cut to the core of the phenomenon. It is at least an entertaining stopover on the journey to the ultimate truth.
Q. “2012: The War For Souls” is the most recent in a series of truth-disguised-as-fiction novels, right? You said previously that the novel form permits you to write what you believe to be true without having to provide scientific evidence. What personal beliefs inspired the story told in “2012”? For instance, do you think such phenomena as parallel universes, the extraction and destruction of the soul and shape-shifting reptilian aliens are truly ahead on the horizon? Strieber: The novels are not truth disguised as fiction. They are an attempt to explore various possibilities and speculations through fiction, and hopefully unearth some truth in the process. For this reason, they are far more important than the nonfiction I have written speculating about the meaning of my own life and the close encounter experiences of myself and so many others. There are some elements in the novels that I believe to be true but cannot prove, and others that are speculation based on my own memories, dreams and reflections. Q. A great deal of the story turns on the aforementioned reptilian aliens. Not to give too much away, but do you believe the possibility exists that highly placed human officials and certain cultural movers and shakers are actually reptilians in disguise? That theory has been kicked around before, chiefly among conspiracy theorists. Is there any truth in that in your opinion? Strieber: I have no idea if shape-shifted reptilians exist or not, or any aliens for that matter. I’ve never been sure of the origins of close encounter experiences or UFO sightings. It’s not at all obvious to me that the phenomenon involves aliens. I do think that we all know pretty well what is though, but we do not have the language to describe it. It is part of human life, part of the way the universe addresses consciousness, and part of how we look at ourselves. It must be seen as a long continuity of human experience that, at various times in the evolution of culture, and in different places, has become focused in different ways. Thus the ancients had their encounters with various entities and deities, the people of the Middle Ages with fairy-folk, and now us with this elaborately developed manifestation of the technological age. We are closer to evolving an appropriately patterned reaction of the phenomenon now, or we would not see so much more of it than we have in the past. It is able to interact with us physically to an extent, now, and is able, for example, to manifest elaborately in such things as crop circles. And, if you look at the whole continuity of that phenomenon, you see that it is also gradually focusing into forms that have meaning for us as well as for whoever is creating them. We’re probably closer now than we have ever been to understanding the phenomenon, but being impeded by our own fear, which is translated into the fundamental refusal of science, government and the media to face the truth: the unknown is staring us down, and it’s alive. Q. After many years of writing nonfiction books about the Visitors and the evidence for them, etc., you’ve begun writing horror novels more frequently than you used to. Do you think that some elements of your stories and characters are the unconscious byproducts of the abduction experience? In other words, are you perhaps taking the fear associated with the abduction experience and channeling it into scary stories? Strieber: I hope that “The Grays” and “2012” are not horror novels. I am intentionally letting my unconscious go to work on my life experience, in order to break new ground in these books. The horror novels that I wrote out of reaction to the close encounter experience came before I realized that the Visitors were in my life. The wolfen of my first novel are the Grays as I understood them unconsciously at the time. Similarly, the vampires of “The Hunger” are the blondes. The fairy-folk of “Catmagic” are the rushing, humorous, magical figures that appear in so-called “alien blue” in my experience and so many others. Q. You
have been doing rather well lately in terms of selling your novels to
the movies. But I’m told that you don’t write with the idea of
future movies in mind. Still, are you pleased with how the movies have
turned out? I’m thinking all the way back to “Wolfen” and “The
Hunger,” then the nonfiction “Communion,” of course, and the
partially nonfiction “The Day After Tomorrow.” Have the moviemakers
done justice to your work for the most part? And what are your hopes for
the movie versions of “The Grays” and “2012”? You certainly got
some seasoned Strieber: Of course, I’d like to see the new movies turn out well. “The Wolfen,” “The Hunger,” and “The Day After Tomorrow” were all terrific films, and I’m very grateful to have seen that. “Communion” also had a few good scenes. I offer the filmmakers whatever participation they want from me, but I don’t press myself on them. “Communion” was roughly based on a script written by me, but I don’t offer myself as a screenwriter anymore. Q. It’s been 20 years since “Communion” was a number one bestseller. How do you feel about that kind of phenomenal success looking back at it now? Did you ever anticipate that the abduction experience would remain so central to your life? What about the book’s enormous impact on both the UFO community and the general public? Strieber: I rue the day I published “Communion.” It destroyed my career and ruined my life. But it also freed a lot of people from the bondage of thinking themselves mad, and that has been gratifying. Q. Getting back to the reptilians in “2012.” The issue of good versus evil among the various alien species continues to be a divisive one in the UFO community. Where do you stand on the controversy? I’ve heard you say many times that the Visitor experience is fraught with moral complexity and that there are no easy answers about the good versus evil of their nature. Would you care to expound on that further here? Strieber:
The close encounter experience naturally reflects the rest of human
experience, which is morally very ambiguous, to say the least. Human
acts can be both good and evil at the same time. It is good to have
children, for example, but evil to destroy the planet. How do you
reconcile those two things? Or, for an even more morally ambiguous
situation, the UN in the 1950s and 1960s dug wells all over We cannot tell whether what is happening to us is good or evil, and dividing the manifestation into “good aliens” and “evil aliens” is a misuse of the human imagination, because there is no way to determine whether or not such divisions are true. We only have guesswork. If we were a troupe of chimpanzees, we might regard human beings who came and dragged members of our group away and gave them mysterious injections as incredibly dangerous and evil when what they are actually doing is beneficial to the chimps. After a few of these events, the chimps will be hostile to the bush vets. On the other hand, bushmeat hunters, working from hidden places, and killing members of the troupe, might be little noticed. Q. Where do you feel the whole complex of UFOs, alien abduction, prophecies of the apocalypse, etc., is leading? Is it even possible to speculate meaningfully about our future with the Visitors when then there is so much that is unknown and perhaps unknowable? Can we strike a proper balance between the collective fear of doomsday and the hope for the world’s salvation? Is it logical to be optimistic? Strieber: The manifestation is becoming slowly more rich and complex, but I don’t know that it will lead anywhere before environmental collapse captures our entire attention. It’s a shame that all of the knowledge that has been left here, in the form of witness testimony, material objects such as implants, UFO video and crop circles, is ignored by science. This is the greatest waste of knowledge in the history of mankind, and a terrible tragedy. However, there is reason for optimism because the interface, as it were, between the ordinary man and this unknown is becoming richer and richer. If other events do not overtake us, inevitably science will catch up with ordinary people. The recent mathematical proof that parallel universes are real, coupled with the fact that physics suggests that there might be “tears” between universes, might give science a reason to take a new look at the whole phenomenon, because it looks so very much like an organized effort to reach us by people who operate under very different laws of reality, and who can penetrate our reality very deeply without our acknowledgement of them. This is exactly what it would look like if they were from a parallel universe, and using some sort of technology, skill or evolved ability to make their presence known to us. [Visit Sean Casteel’s website at www.seancasteel.com Casteel is the author of “UFOs, Prophecy and the End of Time,” “Signs and Symbols of the Second Coming,” and “The Excluded Books of the Bible,” all available at his website, at Amazon.com and Filament Books.] THE END
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