- 3 weeks ago
Most people think that UFOs are just machines in the sky. But researcher Jacques Vallée and writer Whitley Strieber believe that the explanation is much stranger and more terrifying - a terror that Strieber has experienced firsthand.
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00:00Some people who are associated with the CIA came to my office one day unannounced and started
00:26talking about ufos they said we have this medical data we need your help looking at the brain scans we
00:36found the same internal scarring what's special about these people well they're pilots we're seeing
00:44them in the morning afternoon we're seeing them in the evening and they're maneuvers they don't
00:48correlate with the technology that i'm aware of as a fighter pilot all these different government
00:53agencies had pertinent information on this topic that they were sharing there was virtually no
00:59discussion in mainstream news outlets yet meanwhile local papers there were thousands and thousands
01:07of reports all over the world after that night i became scared i had a mark on the side of my head
01:18i had been rectally injured i was obviously the victim of an assault of some sort but when
01:36small Ск qué era i had a mark on his bike being coached sometimes and, but, so love,
01:51to work with you in the next situation.
01:55Polk and marids also piloted
03:02There's something elusive or trickster-like about the phenomena themselves.
03:07It might be fair to say we're in a Jacques Vallée moment here.
03:12Some questions about what's happening today, but also some questions you probably answered
03:29before about your history.
03:34About?
03:35Your history.
03:36Yes, okay.
03:36For me, Jacques Vallée is the barometer.
03:43He's a major UFO researcher, really legendary in many ways.
03:47I'm not sure it's common knowledge, but the Monsieur Lecombe character, played by François
03:54Truffaut, is actually based on Jacques Vallée.
03:58He started out as very much a kind of nuts and bolts kind of guy.
04:08You know, the UFO was a machine in the sky and it was about tracking things with NASA and,
04:15you know, maps and astronomy and etc.
04:17He's moved very much to a view that it's also about folklore.
04:24It's about religion.
04:25It's about a consciousness.
04:26Jacques Vallée is certainly one of the most influential, one of the most, I think, intellectually
04:48nuanced and innovative thinkers who've been a part of the UFO world now for a good long
04:55time.
04:56On this subject of paranormal, of UFO, UAP, does it feel the world has changed?
05:04The public's awareness of the problem has deepened in the last five years, certainly.
05:18People are taking it more seriously because now it's not just one person seeing something.
05:24It's one person seeing something supported by technology that we trust.
05:31So that takes the whole subject to another level.
05:41I was just in Washington a few days ago because I had been asked to brief some staff people on the background of the problem.
05:51Just last week, the U.S. government revealed they are tracking more than 650 potential cases of so-called unidentified aerial phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs.
06:04Director of the Pentagon's All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean Kirkpatrick.
06:10Of those over 650, we've prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous, interesting value.
06:20I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, to which I was denied access to those additional read-ons when I requested it.
06:33So, to be clear, you were meeting with Aero staffers?
06:40I'd rather not talk about who asked to meet with me.
06:45And there are a number of us, you know, are providing background data and historical data so that hopefully some of the mistakes made before are not repeated.
06:56Jacques Vallée, international authority on the UFO experience.
07:02First thing I'd like to dispel is a frequent misconception that UFOs are limited to this country.
07:08Well, UFOs are not an American phenomenon. They are a worldwide phenomenon.
07:13The UFO community, it has to be said, is a diverse community. There's lots of different voices, lots of different perspectives involved.
07:22Lots of UFO sleuths in the early days, these detectives, these investigators.
07:27But Jacques Vallée was not the first. Probably the first great one and the one who really makes a huge difference is this guy Donald Kehoe.
07:36A retired military man, a guy who then makes a career as a pulp fiction writer.
07:48So he's got connections to both of those worlds.
07:51And he is assigned by one of these pulp magazines to actually conduct a kind of investigative journalistic reportage about this topic.
08:01The UFO movement as we know it today really begins just a few years before this, in 1947.
08:16There's a private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold who's flying over Washington State, who sees these nine objects flying in a pattern at enormous speeds in formation.
08:28And he reports this to the media.
08:32And from that moment on, you start to see a wave of sightings across America.
08:37Keyhoe talks to some of his sources in the military and in intelligence.
08:54And he publishes in 1950 an article and a book later on called The Flying Saucers Are Real about this phenomenon.
09:03Is there any tangible evidence that these flying saucers exist?
09:08Well, I'm positive they exist. The weight of the evidence makes it impossible to arrive at any other conclusion.
09:14This book is really, really important for a number of reasons.
09:18First of all, the arguments it makes. That the government is pretty much convinced that these things are extraterrestrial in origin.
09:25Secondly, they're keeping it a secret because they're scared it's going to provoke a mass panic.
09:31And third, that the belief is that the aliens are now here for the first time because they've seen that we have exploded atomic bombs.
09:40They know we have the secret to atomic energy and that concerns them.
10:01The other thing that's really key about Donald Keyhoe is that chapters of the book get serialized in newspapers and magazines throughout the world.
10:13So, by the end of 1950, Donald Keyhoe and his arguments are known virtually across the globe.
10:20I've always wanted to be an astronomer. You know, when I would grow up, I had a telescope.
10:30What teenagers do when they discover science and so on.
10:36And what changed my look at things is that I saw a UFO with a friend of mine.
10:43We were the two best students in physics and math. And he saw it independently of me.
10:52Arrived at a few hundred meters from the place where we saw the object, the engine stopped with the lights.
10:58My radio, which was turned off, was turned off, without any apparent reason.
11:02We had the impression that it was a hammer, a hammer that turned slowly.
11:06And from that, it was detached from a cone, a kind of square root.
11:10L'objet, avant de disparaître, a arrêté d'osciller sur lui-même.
11:15Mais très rapidement, ce n'était plus qu'un point dans le ciel.
11:19This was very clear blue sky in summer in France, outside Paris.
11:25Very clearly a disk.
11:28My mother saw it first, called me. I saw it with her. There was no question.
11:35The next day, this friend told me he had seen the same thing with binoculars.
11:41I got him to draw it for me, and it was exactly what I had seen.
11:50At the time, there were new aircraft coming up, you know, the first jets and so on.
11:56I said that it could be a new device that's going to be publicized later.
12:05Except that it didn't.
12:06My first job was at Paris Observatory, tracking the early satellites.
12:20So we were working with the U.S. Navy, you know, we're computing orbits of satellites.
12:25So this was a new, completely new science coming up, and it was exciting.
12:30We, I mean, the whole team, saw some things we could not explain, but we did not report it.
12:41And the lesson there, I asked why didn't, I mean, we had computed the orbit, we had the data,
12:47with data from other observatories, why don't we send it to the U.S. Navy?
12:52And my boss said that the Americans would laugh at us.
12:56And the last thing you want as a scientist in France or anywhere else in the world
13:02is to be laughed at by the American Academy,
13:06because the Americans may have an explanation for this that they haven't given us.
13:12Major Quixote, why, why will the Air Force, why will the United States Government
13:17withhold information from United States citizens? For what reason?
13:21Because they're treating them like children, the way they did with the H-bomb at first,
13:24and the way they were doing with, they've been doing with other things.
13:26Now, I'm not attacking the United States Air Force.
13:29I'm attacking a small group in there that has been persistently keeping this from the, from the public,
13:36just as they've kept other things.
13:40The conspiracy theory, at least within the UFO world,
13:44is really something that emerges almost from the very beginning.
13:49Lots of people over the decades are asking, what are they?
13:52Where are they from? What are their intentions?
13:54But there's this second order question, which is, what does the government know?
13:59When are they going to come clean?
14:01And in fact, Donald Kehoe really makes that his focus.
14:05He becomes the head of really America's biggest UFO organization called NICAP.
14:14NICAP's mission is primarily going to be what I think we today would call disclosure.
14:19Get the government, lobby the government to come clean.
14:22We want congressional hearings.
14:24NICAP's director, Major Donald E. Kehoe, insisted that the Air Force knew more than it was telling.
14:30We are being observed by a highly advanced superior civilization.
14:37Instead of being a subject for ridicule and a big joke,
14:42actually is a serious matter which could affect the lives of all of us.
14:47And for the umpteenth time in as many years, the Air Force, called before a congressional committee, said it was hiding nothing.
14:55There's nothing in the records that could indicate that we have been vindicated by any advanced civilization.
15:02Going back to the 1950s, people love the government secrecy movies.
15:09But it's often called science fiction for a reason.
15:14We live in a country where conspiracy theories now are all the rage, right?
15:18We have political leaders that traffic conspiracy theories in a way that we didn't a generation ago.
15:24I find it hard to believe, having spent so many years with these agencies and the people who work there,
15:33mostly good people, mostly dedicated public servants,
15:36that they have orchestrated this vast galactic conspiracy for decades and decades.
15:42But people love a good story.
15:45And the more fantastical it is, the better.
15:48The committee wishes to emphasize that there is no evidence of any wider conspiracy.
15:55No evidence whatsoever.
16:02No matter what the answers are, it's potentially one of the biggest news stories,
16:06if not the biggest news story in the history of mankind.
16:09So, obviously it would be huge if we know, you know, without a doubt that we're not alone.
16:15If the Chinese or the Russians have developed some futuristic technology and we don't know about it,
16:21it is the biggest intelligence failure in history.
16:26And they had them in 2004, flying circles around the USS Nimitz off California.
16:30That's two decades ago.
16:31So what do they have now?
16:33If it's our secret technology and Congress doesn't know about it, that's a scam.
16:40So, you know, wherever you might come down on the explanations for the unidentified aerial phenomena,
16:47as they call them, UAP, whatever it is, it's a huge story.
16:51And if you're in the news business, why would you not want to cover that?
16:54On the basis of what I had seen was at Paris Observatory.
17:01There was no question then for me that those phenomena were real.
17:06As a French citizen, I had access to the early French files, which were kept by the military.
17:12I had access to big computers, so I started building databases, building my own files, more or less privately,
17:22with interested colleagues who were not afraid of the stigma attached to it, which was real.
17:28You know, somebody told me, you're not going to have a career as an astronomer in France if you continue doing this.
17:35But I didn't care because I had the data.
17:42I would talk to somebody who reported something to the police, the farmer or the rancher or whatever.
17:51But I would ask around, are there other people who've had something like that around?
17:57Well, there's a farm, you know, a few miles down the road where the same thing happened, but they never reported it.
18:04I would go to the farm and I would talk to the farmer.
18:07Most of the time they would be shocked.
18:09And I would laugh and I would say, well, you know, I talked to your neighbors.
18:13And I'm really interested in what you saw.
18:16One of them described something that happened, not to him, but to his father.
18:22This was 1932, okay? It wasn't 1947 or 1957.
18:30I have a great deal of respect for Jacques.
18:32And what I admire about him is he is ultra objective.
18:37He listens to the eyewitnesses and he just accepts what they report
18:43and documents it and the diversity of these encounters.
18:47He has been working on the topic, I think, longer than I've been alive.
18:51So you have to respect that, at least.
18:58I was recruited to join the University of Texas Astronomy Department
19:04to work on galaxies and planets and computing.
19:08And then I was told, if you want to continue looking into, you know, the UFO issue,
19:15you know, use the equipment on your own time.
19:18As long as you do the work for the department.
19:21I rebuilt the files with the help of my wife.
19:25And we ended up with something like 10,000 cases on the computer.
19:30By the 1960s, here in the United States, scientists, academics, people like that are now looking into this matter.
19:39Probably the big advocate is the consultant J. Allen Hynek.
19:44Hynek was an astronomer.
19:49And from the very earliest days of the flying saucer phenomenon in the 40s,
19:54he was brought in as a consultant to the Air Force to help them in analyzing these reports that were coming in.
20:01Dr. Hynek had always been in communication with the people in Austin and Texas.
20:08So he heard of my database and said, if you want to come to Northwestern in Chicago, I'll give you access to the U.S. files.
20:17So I told Hynek, I'll bring the European files and you let me look at the American files and we'll merge it together.
20:29And we'll try to do some high level statistics.
20:33So we started working together on that.
20:36It's very clear that at least privately, Hynek becomes ever more convinced that there's something that just can't be explained away in these sort of conventional ways.
20:48I started almost as a complete skeptic because I thought the whole thing was a question of post-war nerves.
20:55But it was the persistence of the phenomenon.
20:58It refused to dry up and blow away.
21:01It finally led me to the belief that we had a real phenomenon to deal with.
21:09The computer work first was designed to clean the data,
21:13finding the patterns that are natural physical patterns,
21:18to narrow the database to the cases that were the most intriguing,
21:24and then to look at their distribution in space and time.
21:30What emerged were situations where there was a lot of reports in a particular part of the world
21:36that peaked in about a month or two and then declined.
21:41So you had essentially three months of a wave of cases that were not explained by sociology.
21:49So we could begin to look at the patterns of these waves.
21:551950, 1952, 1954, 1956.
22:00It breaks down in 1957.
22:03What is 1957, Sputnik?
22:08Today a new moon is in the sky,
22:10a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.
22:14The Soviet satellite triumph was demonstrated for all to see.
22:17All around the world we listen.
22:28So you can say, well, there were more people looking up in 1957
22:32because they were looking for Sputnik.
22:37I think there's plenty of evidence that during the Cold War,
22:40the government fanned the flames of UFO hysteria on purpose.
22:44Because if we were building secret planes and testing them out in the Nevada desert,
22:48we didn't want the Russians looking at them.
22:50So if you start spreading UFO hysteria,
22:53people are looking here, people are looking there,
22:55including the Russians and the Soviets, too,
22:58to throw them off the stuff we're sort of hiding,
23:01we don't want them to look at.
23:07Project Blue Book was an Air Force project.
23:09They were the leading agency in the 50s and 60s,
23:12involved with everything that was going on with the UFOs
23:15and with the investigations that went on.
23:18If they have retrieved material and craft and bodies or anything like that,
23:24if they retrieve these things during the Cold War,
23:28they certainly are not going to want to reveal that to the Russians
23:32or anyone else in the outside world.
23:34They were reporting to Congress every year
23:37that they could explain everything except maybe 2% of it,
23:41which meant it's not worth spending money on it,
23:45which was a big mistake,
23:47because the 2% could be the 2% that really mattered.
23:52But that's a scientist speaking.
23:55You know, certainly from the military point of view,
23:582% wasn't worth deploying officers and airplanes and everything else.
24:03So, Project Blue Book funded a small project suggested by Dr. Hynek
24:09for me to redo the Air Force V.
24:12So, I was invited with Dr. Hynek to the Foreign Technology Division,
24:18and that's a visit I'm not going to forget.
24:25They had a little building with no windows and about 200 PhDs
24:30who were doing intelligence on primarily Russian equipment.
24:36And you go into the lobby,
24:38and you notice an airplane hanging from the ceiling,
24:41and when you look carefully, you realize it's a MiG
24:44with the hammer and sickle on the tail, okay?
24:47So, that gave you an idea of what was going on in the building.
24:52They were not interested in UFOs.
24:59Hal, interviewer, take one, Mark.
25:04I'm Hal Puthoff, PhD in quantum electronics
25:07from Stanford University,
25:09and I've been part of programs for corporate America,
25:13for various government organizations, intelligence community, DOD, and so on.
25:20In general, in the academic community, things like UFO research
25:25or stigmatized tinfoil hat kind of stuff.
25:29But, behind the scenes, the Department of Defense
25:32and the intelligence community, they don't have that luxury.
25:35If there's something that's real,
25:37that could potentially affect national security,
25:40then they're all over it.
25:43Starting back in the 50s,
25:45the government felt they had to begin to gather data on this.
25:50One of the issues that's difficult to deal with
25:52is the fact that sightings are so ubiquitous.
25:57I mean, hundreds of sightings every year.
26:00The problem for the military, it was a public relations problem.
26:06They didn't have a budget to investigate all the cases.
26:09This was a real albatross around the neck of the Air Force.
26:14They hated dealing with this subject.
26:15So they really wanted to get out of it,
26:17and so they asked that the University of Colorado
26:21under Edward Condon would take a look at this.
26:25A scientific study that gets conducted starting in 1966
26:29and really gets done by 1968,
26:33gets a lot of public attention.
26:35Dr. Hynek and I were the first two scientists
26:38called as witnesses to testify before the committee.
26:43That investigative task force gets riddled by questions
26:47about whether or not he and others are acting in good faith
26:51and studying it.
26:52When they conclude that this phenomenon not only has no legs,
26:57but that it's certainly not worthy of any kind of scientific funding.
27:02The truth of the matter is they really wanted to get out of it.
27:05And so in 1969, it was decided that the Condon Report,
27:11even though it was a lot of good data, even in their own report,
27:14that they couldn't account for it.
27:16They said, okay, but we're not learning any science here,
27:19so let's just abandon this.
27:21There was an explosion inside the committee.
27:23When they discovered a memo,
27:25one of the administrators had written saying,
27:30we need to get rid of this whole problem.
27:33We have not been hiding anything.
27:37The investigations have been made public.
27:41The very memo by General Bolander that canceled Project Blue Book
27:47had down in the fine print, aha.
27:50But if there's anything that looks like it might affect national security,
27:53we will continue to gather data on that.
27:56So the truth of the matter is if the program didn't die,
27:58it just went black.
28:00I do think it's curious that you never see the Air Force talk about it.
28:08It's always Navy pilots.
28:10You never hear anything from the Air Force.
28:12The Air Force has been very noticeably silent on this issue,
28:16and the Navy has taken the lead in terms of speaking about it,
28:19acknowledging the videos, contributing to reports.
28:23Of course, the Air Force was responsible for a lot of the things
28:26that happened in the past that people are unhappy about.
28:29The committee concluded that in the 19 years since the first UFO was sighted,
28:35there has been no evidence that unidentified flying objects
28:39are a threat to our national security.
28:44As we convene here, UAP are in our airspace,
28:47but they are grossly underreported.
28:49These sightings are not rare or isolated, they are routine.
28:52Parts of our government are aware of more about UAP than they let on,
28:55but excessive classification practices keep crucial information hidden.
28:58I served in the Navy for 32 years.
29:02It's weird, but there are cultures within each military branch,
29:06and the Navy culture is very much one because we work on ships,
29:11away from any kind of support or any kind of observation sometimes,
29:16that we just learn how to do things on our own.
29:20And we take initiative, and we're not afraid to speak out,
29:23because we sort of own the issue.
29:26But the Air Force always has some oversight,
29:30and that oversight creates a much more hierarchical organization.
29:34And you see that in UAP reporting.
29:37These pilots, these Navy pilots are not afraid to come out,
29:40but the Air Force, their reporting is next to nothing.
29:43Navy and Air Force jets are both training and doing exercises in the same area.
29:48The Navy pilots are seeing and reporting these UAP.
29:51None of the Air Force pilots are reporting these things.
29:54And it's not because they weren't seeing them.
29:56They had to have been seeing them.
29:57They have even better sensors than the F-18s.
30:00UAP are not going to be discriminating
30:02between any given military branch of any given country, obviously.
30:06The Air Force has to be seeing these.
30:08Of course, the Air Force has a lot more to lose than the Navy,
30:11because they own this multibillion-dollar air defense system,
30:14so they'd be acknowledging that they're failing to meet their mission.
30:18The problem for people like me who've been studying it for a long time,
30:23what the military sees with their devices is only maybe 10% of the cases.
30:31I worked on a classified database, as you know,
30:34that had 260,000 cases from all over the world.
30:38Those are not being considered right now.
30:41I cannot really talk about what we actually did,
30:57but there is no reason why that should remain classified.
31:02How did you first understand who Jacques Vallée was?
31:06Do you remember him?
31:07Oh, yeah, absolutely.
31:08Did you even know the name before, though?
31:10No.
31:11Never heard of him?
31:12Didn't know who he was.
31:13I'd been starting to read in the area,
31:16and, you know, mostly watching YouTube
31:18and going down some pretty weird rabbit holes.
31:23Jacques reached out to me about two or three weeks later,
31:27and so we went for lunch,
31:29and he said,
31:30well, what do you think about what the aliens might be?
31:32And so I gave him my answer.
31:35He completely destroyed me.
31:39I was infuriated.
31:42And then I realized, I like this guy,
31:44because he just deconstructed my argument.
31:49What was your theory that you gave Jacques Vallée at lunch that day?
31:54That it's future humans.
31:57It was just a speculation.
31:58Future humans have come back to mess with us or watch us, you know.
32:02He didn't prove me wrong.
32:04He proved to me that my certainty of the conclusion was misplaced.
32:11And we just became friends.
32:15And I saw him from that point on almost literally every other week.
32:20Obviously, his work in biology and medicine is exceptional,
32:25but I admire his willingness to jump into this
32:29and to look at the accumulated data.
32:32So we started working together.
32:35When it comes to UAP or UFOs,
32:38there's a story and then there's material evidence.
32:43I'm very grateful for people like Dr. Norland
32:47to bring leadership and to bring real science into it
32:50because it's going to be needed.
32:52Scientists are beginning to realize that, well,
32:56there appears to be more to this than we thought.
33:00We have such excellent sensor systems that have been developed.
33:04So now you've got the pilots in the air taking pictures
33:08with their forward-looking infrared radar system.
33:11You've got overhead planes that are getting information
33:15on the flight path of it.
33:17You've got other ships at sea catching these things,
33:20you know, dropping from 80,000 feet down to the water
33:24and hardly any time at all.
33:27That's on the detection of the events.
33:31Mr. Fravor, the Tic-Tac incident that you were engaged occurred in 2004.
33:39What kind of reporting took place after that incident?
33:42None.
33:43We had a standard debrief where the backseaters went down
33:45to our carrier intel center and briefed what had happened,
33:48and that was it.
33:50No one else talked to us,
33:51and I was in the top 20 in the battle group.
33:53No one came.
33:55The captain was aware.
33:56The admiral was aware.
33:57Nothing was done.
34:00I think the people who are going to testify before Congress
34:03are all from the defense intelligence agencies.
34:07And, yes, we trust them because they have access
34:10to very, very good information.
34:13But what they look at is very narrow.
34:16What about what people in France have seen in the fields since the 1940s?
34:23What about in other countries?
34:26What about what Whitley Strieber saw?
34:30Of course, I guess the Strieber story is pretty well known.
34:33What happened to you initially?
34:35I first met Whitley over a dozen years ago.
34:43We were both at a retreat center.
34:46Whitley was standing on a patio overlooking the ocean,
34:49and I stepped out onto the patio to introduce myself,
34:53and I said his name.
34:54He almost jumped out of his skin.
34:56And I thought to myself, this is a man suffering from PTSD.
35:01He's been writing about this topic for decades.
35:05There's nobody else like Whitley Strieber.
35:07Whitley Strieber is a novelist, a memoirist.
35:11His best-selling book Communion just changed the world,
35:15changed, I mean, in terms of experiences,
35:18people who have encounters with phenomenon on many, many different levels.
35:24Strieber brings a couple of different things at the table.
35:27One is he's an experienced writer.
35:29He's a horror writer.
35:30He's a very famous one and very good at that.
35:32So here we have somebody who has an experience
35:36who can actually talk about it himself, write about it himself.
35:39Most experiencers don't do that.
35:41They have other people write their narratives for them.
35:48I'm Whitley Strieber.
35:58I grew up in South Texas, old-fashioned Texas family.
36:18From early times, I was very interested in writing.
36:21I wrote my first short story when I was six.
36:24And it wasn't much of a short story, but my mother loved it.
36:27And when I left high school, I was going to become a writer.
36:31That was the only thing I wanted to do.
36:36And then I met Anne in April of 1969, and everything began to change.
36:42She was in New York trying to become a fashion designer.
36:49So here were these two crazy dreamers,
36:52a fashion designer and a writer, right?
36:55We had been doing very well with the writing,
36:57and we had a little money in, I guess it was 84.
37:02And we realized we could have a place outside of the city.
37:06We found this little cabin way out in the middle of nowhere.
37:09Since I was a full-time writer,
37:12we could actually live there all summer
37:14when our little boy wasn't in school.
37:16So we bought it.
37:18That's how it started.
37:20And we certainly didn't expect anything peculiar to happen there.
37:32The Christmas was exceptionally lovely.
37:35Our little boy was at the perfect Christmas age.
37:39There was absolutely nothing that night
37:43that would have suggested anything strange to happen the next morning.
37:50This was witnessed by two friends, Annie Gottlieb and Jacques Sandalescu.
37:55They were in the cabin downstairs,
37:58and our son was in the next bedroom downstairs,
38:01and we were in the master bedroom upstairs.
38:03And in the middle of the night, I was awakened by light.
38:07A lot of light woke me up right away,
38:09and it was cold and the wood stove had been on,
38:12and I thought, oh, my God, the stove set the roof on fire.
38:17So I jumped out of bed, and at the same time,
38:20there was a huge bang that came from outside,
38:23and the light went away.
38:28Then our little boy was awakened by the bang and started screaming.
38:33And so I ran down,
38:35and the door to Jacques and Annie's bedroom was open,
38:39and Annie was standing in the doorway, as I recall,
38:42and I said, it's all right, it was nothing.
38:46And I went and comforted my son and then went back to bed.
38:53But later, when Annie and Jacques were questioned
38:58without any preamble,
39:01they remembered a lot that was unusual.
39:04Jacques had seen a light so bright
39:06he thought it was daylight, and he thought he'd overslept.
39:09Annie had heard feet scurrying from above,
39:12from the ceiling, as if someone was running,
39:14little feet were running out of the bedroom.
39:24We weren't aware of any of that at night it happened,
39:27but after that night, I became scared.
39:34I bought a shotgun, I bought a pistol.
39:36I could not imagine sleeping another second at the cabin,
39:40and Anne thought I was going crazy.
39:47After the experience in December,
39:50I was really strung out.
39:53I hurt.
39:54I had been assaulted.
39:56And that was obvious to me.
39:58I mean, I had a mark on the side of my head.
40:00I had been rectally injured.
40:03I was obviously the victim of an assault of some sort,
40:05but when?
40:07Who?
40:09You mentioned initially going to a doctor.
40:11Yes.
40:12Several times, right?
40:13I want to know how you tried to rule out
40:16any kind of mental or emotional aspect to it.
40:21I went to the doctor because my first thought was,
40:25either it's a brain tumor or psychosis of some kind,
40:30because the memories were very vivid.
40:34I went through an MRI scan to determine whether or not
40:37the brain was in normal shape, and it was.
40:40The test showed that I was an exceptionally stable brain,
40:44highly unlikely to hallucinate.
40:46What I wanted to do was to find out that there was some explanation
40:52for this that was normal, a rational, rational explanation.
40:58I think on the second doctor visit, he examined me rectally
41:01because I mentioned that I was in pain,
41:03and he did find it had been raped.
41:07And, uh...
41:10I was in the...
41:11It was a terrible period of turmoil in our lives
41:14because I was subliminally thinking I was going mad.
41:22When an event happens to you, right,
41:25I think the first thing you have to do is decide
41:27I'm gonna tell somebody.
41:29Yeah.
41:30And I'm guessing Ann is the first person
41:32you're really talking to.
41:34No.
41:35I thought, I can't tell Ann this.
41:38And I started trying to get rid of Ann
41:40and get her to divorce me because I figured I'm psychotic,
41:43and I don't know what is going on.
41:46Finally, I got it together enough,
41:49and I told her one night she was...
41:54Tears were coming at the edges of her eyes
41:56because she was thinking I was gonna say,
41:58Honey, we need to end this.
42:00It's not working.
42:02And instead, I say,
42:05I think I was taken aboard a flying saucer by little men,
42:08and she blurts out,
42:10Oh, my God.
42:11Thank God.
42:12I thought you were going crazy.
42:17We burst out laughing and sort of laughing and crying.
42:20At the same time, we just flew into each other's arms,
42:22and that's when the whole rest of our life started.
42:24You reach out to the medical community,
42:29you have testing done.
42:30At what point did you say to yourself
42:32or did you speak with Ann about writing the story?
42:36After I had the two sessions
42:40with the head of the New York State Department of Psychiatry,
42:44and one of the literally the leading psychiatrists
42:47in the United States.
42:51We had to face the fact that apparently something had happened
42:57that involved these strange beings,
43:01that they were real in some way.
43:04As to what they were,
43:06I've never been ready to say they're aliens from another planet.
43:10A lot of other people have said that for me,
43:12but that's not what I say.
43:14I call them visitors because we don't know what they are.
43:17We have no idea.
43:21My wife, I have to give her credit.
43:23She was always encouraging me to write.
43:25She was the one who made sure that Communion, the book,
43:31was a book essentially of questions, not of answers.
43:37And millions of people responded to it.
43:40They knew it.
43:42They recognized it from something in their own lives.
43:45When I was a boy, you know, I think I was around seven or eight,
43:49I woke up with little people in my room.
43:52You know, and I told my parents, I said,
43:55there's these little men who come into my room at night,
43:57and I'm awake, and I can't move.
43:59And I said, oh, you're dreaming. It's okay.
44:01And one of them looks in the window.
44:04And then that happened for about two weeks.
44:06I'm getting goosebumps remembering it.
44:10And then it stopped.
44:11I don't have any bad memories of it.
44:13I just remember it.
44:14I didn't know what a UFO was then.
44:17There was no internet.
44:18Aliens weren't a discussion topic.
44:20There were three channels on our TV, black and white.
44:22But it wasn't literally until I was a grad student at Stanford,
44:28and I was at a used bookstore in the science fiction section,
44:32of course, and I pull out a book,
44:35and there on the cover was the face of what I had seen.
44:40And it was Whitley Stryver's Communion.
44:44I remember dropping the book on the ground
44:48and had like a nervous breakdown
44:50because it was like that was, that was,
44:53and it all came flooding back.
44:59I want it to be a film,
45:01and somehow it ended up kind of cockeyed.
45:08I think it would have been possible
45:11for the film to reflect the open-endedness
45:14and questioning of the book.
45:16But it does freeze things
45:19in a kind of level of reality.
45:23Christopher Walken danced in the film.
45:25He's a wonderful, great actor,
45:26and also a great song and dance man.
45:28And he dances great, but people keep asking me,
45:30well, did you really dance?
45:32And I said, of course I didn't dance.
45:36This experience compels us
45:39to keep the question open at every level.
45:43And insofar as the film tended to close the question
45:46a little bit, that wasn't good.
45:48Tell me about your memories initially
45:52of the public reaction.
45:54You went on, you know, shows, you talked about it,
45:56you were open in the public,
45:57obviously went on book tour.
45:59How would you react, do you think,
46:01if you woke up in the middle of the night
46:02and found at the end of your bed
46:04a small figure with two holes for eyes,
46:08a hole for a mouth,
46:09and wearing a very strange metallic garment?
46:13You know, I learned something about people,
46:15a lot about people, when I published Communion.
46:18Well, you'd probably scream, wake up,
46:20and realize that you've been having a nightmare.
46:22Not my next guest.
46:23He didn't scream.
46:24He went along with the whole thing,
46:26and he ended up in a spaceship being probed
46:28and prodded in all sorts of places.
46:30Seriously, when he woke up in his own bed
46:33the following morning,
46:34he had a pain in his bottom, among other things,
46:36and a lot on his mind.
46:38What did he do?
46:39He wrote a book about the whole thing called Communion.
46:42Publishing something with quote-unquote claims,
46:45and there weren't claims,
46:46they were questions,
46:47but they were taken as claims,
46:49is going to make you vulnerable.
46:52Will you welcome, please,
46:54quickly striving.
47:00With an introduction like that,
47:03I wasn't sure that I dared to come out
47:05to where I am anyway.
47:07A lot of people have a bully hidden in them,
47:10and they want so badly to let that bully out.
47:15I dreamt that I was lying in my bed, in the dark,
47:18when all of a sudden this bright blue light filled the room.
47:22Then I was lying on a table,
47:24and these scary animals wanted to operate on me.
47:27Then South Park came out,
47:29and their first episode was a lampoon of me.
47:32Dude!
47:33Visitor!
47:34Totally!
47:35Did they give you an anal probe?
47:36Ah!
47:37What's an anal probe?
47:38That's when they put this big metal hoop-a-joo up your butt.
47:41Whoa!
47:42Aliens stuck stuff up your ass!
47:43No!
47:44I became the rectal probe man,
47:46and found myself being laughed at for having been raped.
47:50Sorry to hear about your ass.
47:52Why are you walking so funny, Cartman?
47:54You know, I'd go on a TV show,
47:57and they'd ask me about,
47:59well, what do you think about the planets?
48:01What about Uranus?
48:03Are you an alien?
48:05To you I am, yes.
48:07Are you gonna probe us?
48:08Why does everyone always assume that?
48:10What am I doing?
48:11Am I harvesting farts?
48:12How much can I learn from an ass?
48:13Well, I...
48:14Pa!
48:15Moronic.
48:16Low-grade.
48:17Creepy.
48:18Ugliness.
48:19What happened?
48:20Did little green men come down and...
48:23No, not at all.
48:25How do you know you're not nuts?
48:27I am talking to you about a real thing, I'm pretty sure.
48:32The public reaction for a long time was much more open-minded and friendly.
48:38In fact, the book came out in October, 87,
48:49and the letter started like a week later.
48:55I was going around touring for the book,
48:57and Ann called and said,
48:58Whitley, we've got a problem.
48:59We've got a lot of mail.
49:01The book became an enormous bestseller.
49:05It captured the experience of countless numbers of people,
49:10many of whom, well into the thousands,
49:13wrote letters to Whitley and his wife, Ann,
49:16describing related experiences.
49:19The post office was bringing huge boxes of mail up to the house.
49:24I said, Annie, what are we gonna do?
49:26We can't even...
49:27We gotta get rid of these letters.
49:28She says,
49:29Whitley, we're not getting rid of these letters.
49:31We're gonna read them.
49:34This population of people who felt unseen
49:38and lacking in any kind of a voice or recognition,
49:41read communion, felt less alone,
49:44and said, this captures something like my experience.
49:49And people might think,
49:50well, these letters are fan letters.
49:52But they really are not fan letters.
49:54They are, let me tell you what happened to me letters.
49:58What happened to me letters.
50:00At length.
50:03They're coming to him to tell them their story.
50:07My name is Jeff Kripal.
50:20I'm a professor of religion, and I'm an associate dean of the School of Humanities at Rice University.
50:26The collection here is the Anne and Whitley Streber collection.
50:33Whitley's been a colleague and a co-writer of mine for over a decade.
50:38And when Jacques Vallée offered to donate his papers and correspondence files,
50:44I immediately approached Whitley and said,
50:46hey, Jacques just did this.
50:48What do you think?
50:50Well, basically, what do you have?
50:55This is the first Anne and Whitley Streber collection box.
50:58I don't know.
50:59There might be nine of these or so.
51:01And I mean, I'm this far in box one.
51:05Whitley published Communion in 1987,
51:09and he made the mistake of putting his address in the book
51:14because he thought, you know, a dozen people might want to write him.
51:17And they received, they think, about a quarter of a million letters.
51:22And it was Anne, actually, who took it upon herself to read through these
51:26and winnow them down to the 5,000 that now exist.
51:30You're talking about 5,000 human lives that are reaching out to an author
51:37to often reveal their stories they've never told anyone.
51:42A lot of the letters look like, they look like this.
51:45I mean, they're literally handwritten with, you know, blue ink on paper
51:51that's been torn out of a notebook.
51:53I mean, they're super personal.
51:56The letter writers consistently say,
52:01please, please call me.
52:03Please, please write back.
52:05They recognized in Whitley's honesty and his transparency
52:09their own anomalous experience, which often they hadn't told anyone.
52:16It's dizzying to fathom that there are more than 10,000 of these letters.
52:21So when you dive in there, you can be delirious.
52:27The details, the specificity, the variety of experiences,
52:32of entities witnessed and observed.
52:35So it's going to take a deeper study of those letters
52:39to really see what they might be seen to embody or testify to collectively.
52:45What the letters say about us and our world is really simple.
52:54We don't know what we are.
52:58We are much more, much more than we let ourselves believe.
53:04We live going down a little road of life, but we live in a magical and extremely strange world
53:15that we are part of and choose not to recognize.
53:20Because if we recognized it, it would be impossible to live out a normal life.
53:29You would be, God knows what would happen to you.
53:37My own feeling about paranormal phenomena in general
53:40is that they tend to occur in a person's life
53:43when there's some kind of transition or trauma or danger or illness or death.
53:49What the flip is, is when an intellectual or a scientist
53:53experiences something in their life that's unexplainable, but it's real.
54:01The flip is when a scientist realizes that, oops, actually mind is fundamental.
54:06And matter is what's epiphenomenal.
54:09Matter is actually some kind of expression of mind or consciousness.
54:12But my science or my chemistry or my physics actually doesn't change at all.
54:17It's just this complete flip of orientation.
54:21In other words, mind or consciousness is real.
54:26Whatever it is, it's part of being human and part of our world
54:30that for whatever reason, we are very reticent to face head-on.
54:36To face head-on.
55:06To face head-on.
55:07To face head-on.
55:08To face head-on.
55:09To face head-on.
55:10To face head-on.
55:11To face head-on.
55:12To face head-on.
55:13To face head-on.
55:14To face head-on.
55:15To face head-on.
55:16To face head-on.
55:17To face head-on.
55:18To face head-on.
55:19To face head-on.
55:20To face head-on.
55:21To face head-on.
55:22To face head-on.
55:23To face head-on.
55:24To face head-on.
55:25To face head-on.
55:26To face head-on.
55:27To face head-on.
55:28To face head-on.
55:29To face head-on.
55:30To face head-on.
55:31To face head-on.
55:32To face head-on.
55:33Transcription by CastingWords
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