Case file · Abduction
Whitley Strieber's 'visitors'
Novelist Whitley Strieber said non-human beings took him from his cabin in upstate New York on 26 December 1985.
1985 CE · 42.00, -74.30 · status: account
The account
His account became the bestseller Communion (1987), later filmed with Christopher Walken. Strieber did not insist the beings were extraterrestrial, calling them 'the visitors', and has written several further books about continuing experiences.
The sceptical view
Sleep paralysis and hypnagogic imagery are the usual ordinary explanations for bedroom-visitor experiences.
The researched reading
The most famous abduction memoir reads like a classic case of sleep paralysis shaped by hypnosis and a novelist’s imagination. His sincerity is not in doubt; the interpretation is.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Perception, memory or mind | 50% | Waking at night paralysed with beings in the room is the textbook pattern of sleep paralysis with hypnopompic hallucinations; memories were then elaborated under hypnosis. Experimental work finds abductees prone to false memory and to strong physiological reactions to imagined scripts. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 15% | Strieber was a horror novelist whose book Communion became a bestseller, though he has stayed consistent for decades. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 15% | He reports other people witnessing later events at his cabin, but these are unverified. |
| Undetermined | 15% | The share the reading had given to fabrication on doubt rather than evidence: the record does not settle it either way. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 2% | Speculative only. |
| Something known, misidentified | 1% | Nothing here is a misread object. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 1% | Nothing natural fits. |
| Secret human technology | 1% | Nothing fits. |
Official position: No official investigation.
Connections in the atlas
- Linda Napolitano 'Brooklyn Bridge' abduction
- Communion: A True Story (summary)
- Whitley Strieber
- Communion
- The grey alien face
- Betty & Barney Hill