Will the Real Whitley Strieber Please Stand Up?

[elfismiles]

Conclusions are where most books fall apart. Like Blum's Out There, however, it's not the conclusions or opinions of the author that make it valuable -- it's the original research containing in the book that exists nowhere else in, uh, "UFOlogy." Schnabel's Dark White makes the very dubious, aka barely empirically tenable, conclusion that Hopkins and Jacobs essentially created the entire phenomenon. Along the way, he was the first to expose and map the completely disgusting and egregious abuses of power being perpetrated by those two "researchers."

Did we read the same book? I did not come away with that as his conclusion.

Schnabel is the same cat who seriously advanced the thesis that two guys with sticks are responsible for all crop circles, although his book on Remote Viewers was considerably more even-handed.

Again, I disagree with your interpretation of his conclusion. He did no such thing. In fact he argued it was several factions with many members perpetrating most of the formations. He also suggested there was some other force at work.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Apparently we did not read the same books, which is not uncommon.

While I am very badly mangling the entertaining scope & scale of Round in Circles, I don't think I'm doing any disservice to the archly skeptical Dark White. Aside from occasional musing that "there's an awful lot of people reporting this" Schnabel is firmly engaged in dismissing the experience, denying any physical/objective reality. His excellent treatment of Persinger's more expensive books is invoked in service of precisely that.

When he wants to be open-minded, it's not subtle - Remote Viewers is a sharp contrast with Dark White.

[justdrew]

here's a report where you can see how scopalamine can effect people in a 'non-clinical' setting...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/17/colombia-sees-rise-in-use-of-zombie-drug-that-affects-victims-for-hours/

[LilyPatToo]

This AM I stumbled across this article on HuffPo UK and it’s gotten me thinking again about all the people who report contact with aliens but don’t show obvious signs of Strieber’s ego-involvement or apparent level of self-deception. Without knowing more about Parkes’ inner life, it’s hard to know whether he’s fantasizing or not, but he obviously holds a fairly demanding, public contact job and is able to interact with other people well enough to hang onto that job and is married and has (human) kids.

I have longtime friends who have memories of interacting with apparent aliens and (back when I was suffering frequent bouts of missing time spent on a local military base) I saw from the back what looked like a tall “Grey” whose skin was actually more of a beige color. But I was drugged and probably under hypnosis and have always distanced myself from that memory. It seemed completely real, but I can’t be certain. And it might have been staged as part of an experiment.

But several people I know well have have seen apparent aliens while not drugged or otherwise interfered with and I can’t discount their experiences. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of us also have strong indications of intelligence agency meddling in our lives, beginning in childhood, as does Strieber. I’d love to know more about Mr. Parkes’ story.

LilyPat

[LilyPatToo]

here's a report where you can see how scopalamine can effect people in a 'non-clinical' setting...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/17/colombia-sees-rise-in-use-of-zombie-drug-that-affects-victims-for-hours/

Re: scopolamine—I’m fairly certain that this drug has had an impact on some “abductee” experiences that took place years back. Above I mentioned what seemed like a sighting of an alien on an Army base and that I was heavily drugged. I think the drug may have been scopolamine, based on what I’ve read about its effects.

Also, when I was given it by a Kaiser doctor back then (not sure of the exact date, but 80’s-early 90’s), he had to keep raising the dose to get any effect at all. He told me I had a very high resistance to it and basically accused me of long-time abuse of the drug. In fact, I’d never abused it at all and had no idea what he was talking about. I think it was in some OTC meds during the 60’s, but not anything I’d taken for many years or in any quantity, ever.

When I first began to research mind control, it came up as a drug used in the US programs and I think I remember an X-Files episode about that. It definitely messes severely with memory and I’ve always wondered how much of what I think I remember happening during missing time abductions was hallucination and how much actually happened. And how much of the accounts by Strieber and other abductees were factual, too, no matter how real they felt at the time…?

LilyPat

[justdrew]

the main place it used to be found was in a Twilight Sleep concoction they used to give mothers during birth. Low doses ca still be found in anti-motion sickness patches. Interestingly NASA is making or has just made a new anti-motion sickness version that works as a nasal inhaler. No word on if a small batch of the production runs have much higher levels

[tapitsbo]

I remember reading somewhere about someone who claimed they were made to dress up as a "grey" when they were a child, with nylons stretched over their face. I forget where I read this but if what they said was true there must be others with similar memories.

[guruilla]

Curious that the location, Whitby, connects the material both to Strieber and to my own childhood, since I grew up in Yorkshire and visited Whitby on occasion.

Also of course the Saville connection

Also this:

Scopolamine is especially notorious for its use in sexual assaults, and was even detected in street-level date rape drugs that sent 20 people to hospitals in 2008, according to The International Business Times.

The website Vice also featured the plant in a widely-viewed short documentary that carried harrowing tales of compliant victims all too willing to aid their assailants. Victims who spoke to the camera crews recounted committing crimes on behalf of their assailants and feeling happy to do so until finally realizing what had been done to them.

[LilyPatToo]

I remember reading somewhere about someone who claimed they were made to dress up as a "grey" when they were a child, with nylons stretched over their face. I forget where I read this but if what they said was true there must be others with similar memories.

I remember reading her site too, but cannot find my link to it, unfortunately. She remembered a cult childhood that included a visiting uniformed Nazi officer, too. She and other small, slim children were dressed in tightly fitting gray costumes and used to trick adults into believing they were surrounded by gray aliens. It was a fascinating site with many of her memories of trauma-based mind control written out. I seem to recall the word “morning” in the site’s name, but might be wrong about that.

Also, more recently, prominent abductee author Leah Haley finally came out publically with a statement that she’d gotten through the screen memories and remembered seeing fasteners on the costumes worn by supposed gray aliens during one of her abductions. She’d mentioned it to me in confidence at a UFO Expo years ago, but didn’t go public about it until not long ago.

LilyPat

[elfismiles]

I remember reading somewhere about someone who claimed they were made to dress up as a "grey" when they were a child, with nylons stretched over their face. I forget where I read this but if what they said was true there must be others with similar memories.

I remember reading her site too, but cannot find my link to it, unfortunately. She remembered a cult childhood that included a visiting uniformed Nazi officer, too. She and other small, slim children were dressed in tightly fitting gray costumes and used to trick adults into believing they were surrounded by gray aliens. It was a fascinating site with many of her memories of trauma-based mind control written out. I seem to recall the word “morning” in the site’s name, but might be wrong about that.

Also, more recently, prominent abductee author Leah Haley finally came out publically with a statement that she’d gotten through the screen memories and remembered seeing fasteners on the costumes worn by supposed gray aliens during one of her abductions. She’d mentioned it to me in confidence at a UFO Expo years ago, but didn’t go public about it until not long ago.

LilyPat

RELATED...

... some highlights from:

1992: SYMPOSIUM THEME: “THE ULTIMATE MYSTERY OF THE MILLENNIA”
(Albuquerque, New Mexico) Papers presented: Forbidden Science: The UFO Phenomenon and the Research Community, Jacques Vallee, Ph.D
http://www.psiopradio.com/wp-content/up ... Vallee.pdf

FORBIDDEN SCIENCE: THE UFO PHENOMENON AND THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY
by Jacques Vallee
...

The problem doesn't stop there. Some of the more intriguing episodes, when they are carefully investigated, open up alternative interpretations that are even more chilling in their earthly reality, even more disturbing in their implications than the idea of aliens looking for human embryos. One of the cases in my files involves a continuum between ritual abuse and UFO experiences (10). It seems that alien imagery was deliberately planted into the mind of this female witness as an overlay to a terrifying experience that was not to be consciously recalled. In another case a young man appears to have been made to submit to a curious organization through images of aliens that were planted in his unconscious (11). He recognized them when he saw the cover of Communion. But hypnotherapy led to the opposite result of what abductionists would have expected: the UFO episode seems to have been fabricated to encode and screen suggestions that turned this subject into a virtual slave of the cult in question for several years.
...

REFERENCES

...

[b]7. Blue files, personal communication, case F184.

8. Personal communication, case F186.

9. Personal communication, case F185.

10. Manuscript, personal communication, M48 (1990).

And of course, as we've so often mentioned ... Vallee himself wrote in his FASTWALKER novel the idea (recapitulated in the JOSE CHUNG's FROM OUTER SPACE x-files episode, of humans dressed up as alien greys.

[guruilla]

I met someone recently who knew an ex-army person with the same basic story.

It's a fascinating piece to add to the puzzle, but still maddeningly inconclusive - since an argument could also be made for these stories (true or not) as part of a cointelpro to create a counter-narrative in which no aliens are required, but one that also will fail to quite fit all the factoids, and so keep us chasing our tales.

Just found about this:



http://dailygrail.com/Reviews/2013/6/Fr ... ll-Mirrors

[guruilla]

New piece at Reality Sandwich, "Exploding the UFO Bottle: Trauma, Perception, & Belief, Towards a New Theory of Ufology"
http://www.realitysandwich.com/exploding_ufo_bottle

[Wombaticus Rex]

Reality Sandwich is a great look for you, man, I hope this gets you a lot more exposure -- and I also hope that "a lot more exposure" turns out to be a good thing.

I wanted to highlight this because it was an excellent & concise summary:

My take on Strieber is that his accounts are profoundly personal accounts which he has given universal significance, thereby inadvertently obscuring their actual meaning. "The Prisoner of Infinity" is an attempt to find that hidden meaning, and if it succeeds, I am aware that it could prove painful for Strieber, and be experienced by him (and others) as invasive.

Is pointing out that the Emperor is really naked invasive? It depends on whose point of view you take. The thing with reality is that it doesn't have much respect for our illusions, including, or especially, the illusion of privacy (discreet ego existence). From the point of view of the unconscious, privacy is just a polite word for secrecy, or denial. And secrets are toxic.

I was very skeptical at the outset of your project but I have been consistently impressed with your actual work. I think you've created something valuable.

[guruilla]

Reality Sandwich is a great look for you, man, I hope this gets you a lot more exposure -- and I also hope that "a lot more exposure" turns out to be a good thing.

I wanted to highlight this because it was an excellent & concise summary:

My take on Strieber is that his accounts are profoundly personal accounts which he has given universal significance, thereby inadvertently obscuring their actual meaning. "The Prisoner of Infinity" is an attempt to find that hidden meaning, and if it succeeds, I am aware that it could prove painful for Strieber, and be experienced by him (and others) as invasive.

Is pointing out that the Emperor is really naked invasive? It depends on whose point of view you take. The thing with reality is that it doesn't have much respect for our illusions, including, or especially, the illusion of privacy (discreet ego existence). From the point of view of the unconscious, privacy is just a polite word for secrecy, or denial. And secrets are toxic.

I was very skeptical at the outset of your project but I have been consistently impressed with your actual work. I think you've created something valuable.

Thanks Wombat. This is meaningful to me to hear. I have found that part of sharing this writing has involved explaining it, or framing it, to get over or around the obstacles of people's assumptions or misunderstanding about it and this has meant going deeper into the material itself - so that, as I kind of intuited from the get-go, it's been a reader-participation project.

I've written for RS on and off for a few years (other pieces here: http://auticulture.com/multimedia/articles/), it's probably far from a perfect fit (I've had my share of hostile feedback, esp. for my piece on psychedelics), but I'm not sure what if anything would be a fit for me anyway.

As for "exposure," yeah, and I dunno. I guess I try to see it like this - if and when I put something out there that's really useful to others in some way then it will get passed around. What I've found out with this current piece is that it may be too "effective" for its own good - at least one of my readers has been so triggered by the material that he's having a hard time continuing, even though he wants to.

Ditto for me, this project seems to have knocked me for six. If the premise is at all true, or real, then it's approaching the very thing that none of us wants to see or to look at. My foolhardy goal has been to do that and somehow make it entertaining! Hell, Poe, Dostoyevsky, and David Lynch did it!

Guess the trick is to make it fiction?

[Hammer of Los]

...

Just dropping in to say hi!

I promise to catch up with your work mr guruilla sir.

Obviously Whitley's work "Communion" was highly influential.

He ought to expect to be the object of some scrutiny.

...