Streiber to sign 'Critical Mass' in Scottsdale Saturday

March 7, 12:00 AMPhoenix UFO ExaminerLarry Lowe

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Author and radio host Whitley Strieber.

Acclaimed author and radio host Whitley Strieber will be in Scottsdale on March 7 at the Poisoned Pen to sign his latest offering, Critical Mass.  The signing begins at 2 PM.  Critical Mass is Dick Cheney's most fearful propaganda tool writ large, the specter of instantanous decapitation of the United States via terrorist detonation of a smuggled nuclear device.  In depicting the race to prevent such a event, Strieber makes a foray into Tom Clancy territory, examining the motives and tactics of both sides of the issue and taking us inside the minds of those who would plan such an atrocity.

The Scottsdale signing is an opportunity for valley UFO watchers to meet Strieber, who has carved out a career examining the unknown country between the edges of our consensus reality and the alternative universes hinted at by UFO and ET phenomena.  For better or worse, the author is inextricably linked with his 1987 work Communion and perhaps more so with the image on the cover, which artist Ted Seth Jacobs created in close collaboration with Strieber in a manner similar to the forensic work of police sketch artists.
 
There is more to Whitely Strieber than inexplicable contact with the 'visitors'.  He began his literary career in 1978 with novel twist on the werewolf genre, The Wolfen, in which he postulated an intelligent species cohabiting with an unwitting human race.  A variation on that meme served as the basis for The Hunger, Strieber's 1981 foray into the vampire genre.  

There are ufologists who espouse the theory that something similar may be going on, that certain advanced species cohabit with humans in Earth's biosphere but maintain their existence covertly.  That may be the other end of a spectrum that begins with an indigenous culture that lives without conception of Wall Street and only rare and inexplicable glimpses of modern technological civilization.

Critical Mass is not the first time Whitley Strieber has nuked Washington DC in an effort to thrill the reader. He reduced the DC metro area to cinders with a half dozen 10 megaton warheads in 1984's War Day, an examination of the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange between symmetrical adversaries of the cold war era.

The publication of Communion, however, changed everything and established Strieber as the leading spokesman for the phenomenon of alien abduction, joining Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, who were documenting the notion that aliens are not only visiting the planet, they are conducting some kind of wildlife survey program, extracting humans from their daily lives, conducting tests, imparting information, implanting devices of cryptic nature and purpose and returning them to their native habitat, often with recent memory wiped, resulting in what Hopkins termed Missing Time.

Communion was a Number 1 New York Times bestseller in the Non-Fiction category, and was on the list for fifteen weeks in hardcover and for thirty-six weeks in paperback.

Neither we nor Strieber will ever know what his literary career might have been had he not published Communion, which he took the precaution of subtitling 'A True Story'. It was a fairly courageous thing to do, given the tenor of the times. Abduction was a new meme, difficult for even some in mainstream ufology to swallow. The lack of tangible evidence, the bizarre and enigmatic nature of the encounters coupled with Strieber's unique imagination displayed in the early work left the entire case open to conjecture that it may have been a novel cloaked in non-fiction clothing--sort of a reverse on the literary genre pioneered by another New York author, Truman Capote, or a prescient use of the Blair Witch Hunt literary device.

After the publication of 'In Cold Blood' Capote never published another work, and certainly Strieber's career suffered as a result of Communion, for he had dared to address what amounted to a politically incorrect aspect of the UFO phenomenon. To this day projects inexplicably are canceled or cannot find a publisher.  At the same time, he must have uncovered something, for he received over a half a million letters in response to the book and the carefully crafted portrait on its cover. Many of those came from people who claimed they had similar experience, or somehow understood the creature on the cover.

Strieber became a guest on Art Bell's Dreamland radio show, which Strieber took over full time and eventually went off the air onto the net where it is a popular weekly feature at his Unknown Country website.

The connection with Art Bell lead to the publication of The Coming Global Superstorm, an examination of the effects of a nonlinearity in global weather patterns. The concept was based in part on the historical record of sudden climatic change and there was precident in the modern historical record. It lead to the 2004 release of The Day After Tomorrow, a controversial motion picture that was used by global warming activists as an example of worst-case effects of adding energy to the weather system.  It was condemned by the scientific community as being extremist in its depiction of the potential for sudden, extreme weather change.

In 2006, Strieber returned to the alien/UFO theme with The Grays and in 2007 released 2012: The War for Souls.

Depending upon which side of the mirror you are looking at, Whitley Strieber is either a talented writer with a knack for extrapolating a truly novel concept into a book length dissertation or a pioneering journalist attempting to document the enigmatic evidence of forces intruding into the comfortable confines of our consensus reality who is on occasion forced to resort to the fiction genre in order to do so.

What you see in the two-way mirror Strieber holds up to the world depends in part upon how much you are willing to consider possible.

Of late Strieber has been hinting in certain interviews in his internet radio show at the notion that we are living in unstable times in terms of consciousness itself, that we are approaching a non-linearity of conscious experience that will result in an ascension.  This can be thought of as a global superstorm of the mind, a confluence of events that will bear out the prophecies of native Americans and the tenants of western religion, where a rapid evolution of human consciousness invokes a shift in reality itself— for those who are prepared.

In a notorious exchange with beat generation offspring writer Daniel Pinchbeck, who also examined the 2012 issue, Strieber was accused by Pinchbeck of promulgating a darker reality by the proliferation of the memes that he gives voice to in his columns and books.  Critical Mass is no exception. There is no question Strieber has a dark side he is willing to explore when he sees the need arise.  His reasoning is that there is both good and evil in the universe and a singular focus on new-age crystal pollyannism only examines half the evidence and leaves the seeker less than fully informed.

Whether or not his art will turn out to be prophecy may depend upon the reality stream you consciously choose to occupy.