Anne Strieber

Anne Strieber was the wife of American writer Whitley Strieber. She appears throughout his published accounts of encounters with the visitors (nonhuman beings), most substantially as the subject of hypnosis sessions covering the nights of July 30, October 4, and December 26, 1985.¹ She and Whitley Strieber owned a log cabin in a secluded part of New York Ulster County, where their primary visitor experiences occurred.² From 1970 until the spring of 1977 the couple had lived in a two-room flat on West Fifty-fifth Street in Manhattan.³ In April 1977, during the stereo voice incident, Whitley Strieber and Anne Strieber were sitting together in their living room when a voice suddenly began speaking through their stereo after it had finished playing a record.⁴ By January 1981 they had closed on a co-op and moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhattan.⁵ When they were first married, the couple chose a motto from Ecclesiastes: “Two are better than one . . . and a cord of three strands is not quickly snapped”;⁶ Anne Strieber cross-stitched it, and it remained with them ever since.⁷

When Whitley Strieber began experiencing what he described as abduction-related memories, he initially hid them from Anne Strieber and their son and sought professional help from Budd Hopkins.⁸ Anne Strieber was first hypnotised on 1986-03-13 to help her recall the nights of October 4 and 1985 December 26,⁹ in a session conducted by Robert Naiman;¹⁰ Hopkins was present, and questions he asked during the session are identified separately from those asked by Naiman.¹¹ The same regression also examined the July 30 hypnosis-recalled day, on which workmen had been building a pool on the deck of the Striebers’ country house;¹² under hypnosis, her memory of that night stopped right before dinner and did not resume until Whitley Strieber returned the next morning, the intervening period completely blank.¹³

On October 4, 1985, Whitley Strieber had driven to the cabin with his wife, their son, and two close friends, Jacques Sandulescu and Annie Gottlieb.¹⁴ Under hypnosis, Anne Strieber recalled hearing a woman’s voice mumbling soothingly during the night, deeper than her own voice.¹⁵ She and Whitley Strieber both perceived an explosion that night.¹⁶ Under hypnosis conducted by Hopkins, she recalled that Whitley Strieber left their bed and went downstairs during the night;¹⁷ she also recalled hearing her son crying and screaming, though she was uncertain whether he called “Mommy” or “Daddy."¹⁸ She later recalled Whitley Strieber’s face as very frightened, his eyes widening and turning very white, as he screamed that night.¹⁹

Under hypnosis, Anne Strieber referred to the 1985 abduction experience December 26 as “the day of the owl,"²⁰ recalling Whitley Strieber talking about “a crystal in the sky” before an owl sighting that night.²¹ She had no memories at all of that night.²² Hypnosis was also used to examine the 1982 white thing incidents (Greenwich Village apartment): under hypnosis conducted by Hopkins, Anne Strieber recalled being thumped or poked in the stomach on LaGuardia Place with a sensation like four fingers, which woke her.²³ She described the “little white thing” she recalled as about as tall as a four-year-old child, white, glowing, and with little pointed feet.²⁴ Neither she nor her son showed any physical evidence of injury from the incidents.²⁵

A separate session, the 1986 hypnosis session March 17, took place at Anne Strieber’s own initiative;²⁶ Hopkins set a ground rule that she should not worry about saying anything she thought Whitley Strieber or Hopkins wanted her to say.²⁷ At the end of that session, Anne Strieber said, “Whitley’s supposed to go. They came for Whitley."²⁸ A week later, Naiman opened a further taped session, the 1986 hypnosis session March 21, by stating the date for the recording;²⁹ during it, she recalled a powerful image that the screaming she had heard on the crucial night had been Whitley Strieber screaming, not their son.³⁰ Separately, on the evening of the 1986 visitation March 15, Anne Strieber witnessed an apparition of a little girl at the family’s country house;³¹ during the same night, Whitley Strieber tried to wake her but found his mouth would not open.³² When he later told her about the beings’ painted suit of aged design, she laughed merrily at the idea;³³ she developed a knot in the top of her right nostril afterwards.³⁴ Whitley Strieber said that Anne Strieber took over the intellectual direction of the couple’s study of the visitor phenomenon, bringing her own creative and open mind and insisting that speculation proceed from known facts;³⁵ together they researched UFO sightings in their area and found it had been a hotbed of sightings for nearly half a century.³⁶

When their son was nine, Whitley Strieber and Anne Strieber became aware that a being who had been physically intimate with Whitley Strieber was taking an interest in the boy, and would hear her craft come over the house making a sound like slowing ball bearings;³⁷ after the boy was on one occasion taken directly out of the house, the couple decided to send him to summer camp.³⁸ Whitley Strieber did not sleep afterwards and told Anne Strieber the whole story the next morning, saying he had no idea what, if anything, had actually happened;³⁹ Whitley Strieber said that Anne Strieber proposed saying nothing to their son Andrew Strieber about the night, and seeing what he said of his own accord.⁴⁰ The following morning Andrew Strieber was quiet at breakfast, then wrote something in his room and silently gave it to Anne Strieber;⁴¹ Whitley Strieber later thought the note had been lost, but Anne Strieber had in fact kept Andrew Strieber’s written note without his knowledge.⁴²

In 1988, while making the Communion film, Whitley Strieber and Anne Strieber took a side trip to Roswell to meet surviving witnesses of the 1947 Roswell UFO incident,⁴³ meeting Walter Haut at his home for an extensive conversation about his work as Roswell Army Air Force Base press officer;⁴⁴ when Anne Strieber asked whether he couldn’t talk about it, Haut replied that if he couldn’t tell her, he wouldn’t.⁴⁵ Following her death, Whitley Strieber described her as someone for whom he felt not just affection but a towering love that continues to enrich him.⁴⁶ Thousands of letters Whitley Strieber received after Communion’s publication are archived at Rice University, 4,000 of them thanks to Anne Strieber’s foresight.⁴⁷ In Transformation, Whitley Strieber refers to having received communications from Anne Strieber since her death.⁴⁸