036 - Transformed by Contact

In the 1980s a book that seemingly came out of nowhere, a book that the author purportedly had a very difficult time actually finding a publisher for, took the world by storm. The book, with the provocative title of Communion, featured the image of a face of a very peculiar creature: one with an oval head, large, almond-shaped eyes, and a decidedly pointed chin. The book was authored by Whitley Strieber, a well-known fiction writer of the time; a writer who had numerous well received and best-selling titles under his belt by the time Communion was published. The image on the cover of Communion of course went on to become the quintessential face of the alien all over the world, partly because, shockingly, that face bore a strange, uncanny and, to many, disconcerting familiarity for people all across the globe. While many might at first have assumed that Communion was a one-off; a book describing one man’s harrowing tale of an encounter with supposedly alien, or at least, decidedly non-human, intelligent entities, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality Strieber continued to have ongoing encounters with these seemingly otherworldly entities, encounters that were filled to the brim with elements of what has come to be referred to as “high strangeness”. Furthermore, as Strieber sought to grapple with the nature and meaning of these adult encounters, he began to realize there was a peculiar familiarity to these Visitors – as he came to call them – that stretched well back into his childhood; even though he had repressed much of those memories in his early adult life. Now it was all coming flooding back, making the entire matter all the more overwhelming and bewildering. He followed Communion with a second book titled Transformation that, from in my opinion, is even more enthralling than its predecessor, because it involves a degree of perspective and clarity that was simply unavailable to the author at the time he penned the first book. In Transformation, Strieber not only describes the bizarre and sometimes terrifying nature of the encounters he had and continued to have, but he begins to offer a kind of response, at first somewhat feeble but growing in intensity and boldness as the months rolled on and the events continued happening. It is not a stretch to describe the kind of interaction that Strieber began to have with the Visitors as “relationship”; though of a kind that continued to feel decidedly one-sided for some time to come. And while the sheer ontological shock and discombobulation involved with these encounters continued to elicit a kind of primal terror in Strieber, he began, slowly but surely, to carve out a kind of mutuality in the experience, eventually even discerning that these Visitors weren’t coming to hurt him, but perhaps to ultimately help him. Who were these Visitors? What was their intention? Why had they chosen him? And what did this mean not just for his future, but for the future of the human species? These are all questions that Strieber wrestled with in his engaging and thought-provoking book Transformation. And we’ll endeavor to do the same in this, the 36th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.