Communion

Communion is a 1987 nonfiction account by Whitley Strieber of his own claimed encounters with nonhuman beings, which sold millions of copies.¹ The book solidified in public consciousness the image of the alien as bald with large dark eyes, prompting thousands of similar accounts of aliens worldwide.² Strieber himself describes it as the story of one man’s attempt to deal with a shattering assault from the unknown,³ and states that it is a true story as far as he knows how to describe it.⁴ To support this claim, the transcripts of his hypnosis sessions with Dr. Donald Klein are reproduced verbatim so readers can confirm that no leading questions were asked,⁵ covering the 1985 abduction experience October 4 and the 1985 abduction experience December 26.⁶ In a footnote, Strieber noted that his wife Anne Strieber’s description of the “little feet” of a white thing at their LaGuardia Place apartment in 1982 reminded him of Annie Gottlieb’s memory of “scampering” at their country house, and that Anne Strieber was unaware of Gottlieb’s account at the time of her own hypnosis.⁷ Strieber had considered calling the book Body Terror, owing to the extreme physical fear he felt during the December episode,⁸ before Anne Strieber, talking in her sleep one night in April in a strange basso profundo voice, said the book must not frighten people and should instead be called Communion.⁹ Strieber later underwent the 1986 polygraph examination of Whitley Strieber October 31 to reassure readers that he sincerely believed what he had reported, stating that the book contained no fictional content.¹⁰

The cover portrait, painted by Ted Jacobs, became one of the book’s most consequential elements. Strieber has said the portrait is somewhat more human-looking than his own mental image of the being,¹¹ and that its mouth was actually nothing more than a complex line with no lips, with a cranium larger than depicted.¹² During the 1985-12 abduction experience of Whitley Strieber he recalled seeing a more complex mouth on the being that peered at him, closer to the cover image.¹³ Strieber has said he came to understand the portrait was intended to make people who had been contacted realise that what they thought was a strange lingering dream was in some way real.¹⁴ He has also recounted that General Arthur Exon told him, after Communion was published, that everybody from President Harry S. Truman down had known within twenty-four hours of a recovery that what had been found was not of this world.¹⁵ Ross Coulthart has said he has met many people whose own encounter experiences were triggered by the grey alien image on the cover of the original edition,¹⁶ which the book helped fix as the gray alien stereotype associated with the Greys and the visitors (nonhuman beings) more broadly.

Coulthart has described Communion, about being taken by nonhuman sentient beings, as a New York Times bestseller,¹⁷ and its sequel, Transformation, followed.¹⁸ Breakthrough is another of Strieber’s books from the same period. While writing Communion, people suggested to Strieber that what had happened to him might have been an Out-of-Body Experience (OBE), a concept he says he had not heard of before.¹⁹ Strieber has said that after publication his uncle telephoned him, saying he had asked for and received permission to talk to him about matters he thought Strieber should know.²⁰ He has also described the release itself as unusual: rather than a normal bookshop rollout, the publisher shipped boxes of the book without warning to every bookstore in the United States.²¹ Strieber has said that at the time he regarded the book as a fascinating one-off and was preparing to return to writing fiction.²² He has said he received thousands of letters afterwards, 4,000 of which are archived at Rice University thanks to Anne Strieber’s foresight.²³

The book’s account also intersects with other cases in the corpus. Kary Mullis told no one of his own encounter until his daughter Louise Mullis called him about her own experience during the Louise Mullis’s road disappearance episode, after which she advised him to buy Communion.²⁴ Peter Khoury has recounted that a person who contacted him, discussing the book’s cover, asked whether it depicted a black poster with white writing, a detail matching that person’s own experience.²⁵ Khoury has also said that two weeks after seeing a “They’re here” poster, he and Vivian saw a large advertising poster for Communion at a bus shelter,²⁶ and that Vivian reacted with shock, saying it depicted what he had described to her.²⁷ Vivian later told Khoury that someone had written a book about his story, after seeing him photograph her holding a copy at his parents’ house.²⁸ Khoury has said he considers the depiction of the hooded beings on the cover and in the subsequent film to be an extremely accurate match to what he saw, better than he believes he could have described to an artist himself.²⁹