★★★★★ 3
I had heard of this book when it made a splash in 1987, I did not have time then...
Format: Paperback
I did not have time to read this book when it came out because I was a young father, and I was at the beginning of my professional career. Now, almost 40 years later, I am a grandfather and I within months of the end of my professional career. So I made time to read it, finally.
What instigated me to do so now, is all the recent activities concerning UAPs and the unexplained sightings of UAPs in the night skies over military bases in New Jersey and, also, in England. Put simply, I was in the mood to give this book a chance.
The "story" starts strong with Whitley Strieber's descriptions of his apparent contact with the "visitors." He is a talented fiction writer and that comes through, but after the first 60 or so pages, the story drags and becomes increasingly repetitive, and hard to read. The penultimate chapter may have read well in 1987, with its buzziness, and the power of three....but in 2025 it doesn't. It just sounds so out-of-date like an Oldsmobile Cutlass with a T-top. (Yes that was a real car...Google it.) Then, there are chapters that are nothing more than transcripts of what Whitley, and his late wife, Anne, had said while in sessions under hypnosis; they are barely understandable, let alone readable. The allusions to quantum mechanics later in the book adon't fit very well, and seem to be an afterthought and are very hard to take. Clearly, Streiber's ideas are not grounded in the science, but in a kind of typical layman's misunderstanding of quantum mechanical "concepts." That is there is an extension of the theory into things it is not meant to explain, and proves that having a little knowledge about something is dangerous. All-in-all, I suffered through the "last," 229 pages (including two appendices), but I can say I have read it from cover to cover.
What is my opinion of the abduction story? I hate to be unkind, but it seems more like the memory of a hallucination, or of a very bad and graphic dream, than something that actually happened. It seems to be the product of a fertile and creative mind of a talented author. Yes, there are other people who also claim to have been abducted, and there are some commonalities among their claims, and I know that their numbers should add credibility to their stories, and I know it is unkind to doubt them, but I do and I remain skeptical.
So did Whitley Streiber write this book knowing full well that is was actual a work of fiction while claiming it was non-fiction, or did he write it honestly thinking that he was sharing objective truths? On this, it is very hard to know...it is plausible that he really believes these things happened to him, and that he wrote about them sincerely. The author himself seems never to be sure. His lie detector results seem to indicate that he is telling something that he truly believes, but one never knows for sure.
To sum up, I am glad the book is no longer a mystery to me. My curiosity was satisfied and that is enough for me, but it took work.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2025
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