Who I Think the Visitors Are

By Anne Strieber

My theory about "the visitors" is different from that of most UFO investigators: I think they are either time travelers, visitors from a parallel universe, the dead—or all 3.

Over the years, we have received many letters connecting the spirits of the dead with visitors. This type of anecdote is anathema to old line UFO researchers, who want the whole thing to be about the conventional concept of encounters with aliens who have arrived in space ships from another planet.


I remember when we invited our secretary, Lorie Barnes (who had had a lifetime of Visitor contact) up to our cabin, she went for a walk along the road. There she met up with her brother, who had been missing (and presumed dead) for over 20 years. She was delighted to see him again and he told her to tell everyone "he was OK." This seems to be the usual message that the dead have for us.

After Whitley, in a last-minute inspiration, put our mail center address in "Communion," we began receiving huge bags of mail every day. I actually had to hire a secretary just to help me OPEN them, but I read every single one and replied to each one that contained an address.


I began keeping a list of the commonalties I found in them. I posted the list above my desk and added a new item to it whenever I noticed the same thing mentioned in several letters from different people. I wish I still had that list today.


The one item I remember most clearly is: "They have something to do with what we call death." I remember this so distinctly because I have never found it in any of the UFO literature I have read.


After Communion was published, Whitley got a call from his agent, who said he had received a frantic message from a government official who needed to ask Whitley a question. Usually Whitley would not want to deal with this type of thing, but this incident was so compelling that he returned the call. The man said, "I have to know what you think about this, I have to know if this is true," so Whitley heard him out.


The man described a typical evening at their suburban home. Their elderly dog had just been taken for a walk, but she suddenly began insisting on going out again, so the wife put on her leash. As she stepped out to take the dog on a second walk, a huge white light passed over the back yard, and their little boy came running down the stairs. He said, "Mommy, Daddy! Jeff came to me with two aliens, and he said to tell you he's all right."


Jeff was the older brother, who had died in an auto accident a short time before. With the help of the visitors, he had somehow managed to bring the message to his grieving family that he was all right. As you'll see from the rest of this essay, this is the same message that keeps being repeated, time and again, by the departed who are somehow interacting with the visitors.


One letter described a soul literally being torn from a body. The man who experienced this wrote a description of what happened after he went to bed one night: "My head had been on the pillow less than thirty seconds when, for want of a better word, it exploded—'it' being my head. The only way I can describe this shocking sensation was that I thought a bomb had blown me to pieces, and that 'I' was nowhere. I ceased to be." Eventually his wife woke up and they switched on the bedroom light and sat up in bed talking quietly about what might have happened. He knew the experience hadn't been a dream, because he'd never fallen asleep. They then heard a low humming that gradually changed into a loud, steady throbbing sound. A quick glance at the clock revealed it was 2:30 a.m. (note that the time was almost the same as when the friend in Austin was contacted in the last letter I'll mention here). The throbbing became deeper and faster, then seemed to stop right over the roof of their house, directly above the bedroom. Before he could go outside to see what was going on, he felt something invisible grab his chest and start pulling with amazing force. He wrote, "I felt like my soul, not my body, was being pulled up vertically towards the still loud throbbing noise, and although I thought it would be futile, I screamed out for my wife to lie on top of me. She did this, and the sensation of pulling eased a little. I was screaming and struggling against an 'invisible beam,' with my wife lying full length on top of me in my own bed at 2:30 a.m. What a sight we would have presented if someone had walked in!" This went on for two full hours. "They pulled, I resisted, my wife hung on and the engine throbbed, until finally it went away, and exhausted and badly shaken, even devastated, we fell asleep." We recently received a letter that suggests the Visitors may have something to do with time travel. "Susan" wrote: "I haven't told this to anyone outside of my close family until now. There is a road in France that we lived next to in 1994 that had been there since Roman times. It is called in English, Highway #1, the oldest road in France. It winds between farms, and there are a couple of villages nearby. The farmers come out early in the morning to shoot pheasant. Those are the only people you see on this road.


"The major users of that road were the Roman legions who built and used it in their conquests. It was also used in both World Wars. Just walking to market, I felt I was walking along a well-traveled way. According to my husband, a history buff, quite a bit of history happened on that road, which might explain the two unusual, unnerving people I saw walking along it about two weeks apart.


"As I was going to market one mid-day, walking with my sack and holding onto my dog's leash, I saw an odd sight walking towards me, a young man. This was odd because almost no one used that road, but what really caught my attention was the way he stared at me and the unusual clothing he was wearing. He was about 19 or 20, with olive-colored skin. He was dressed in a navy blue sweat shirt with a hood and blue jeans. Sounds normal, right? Not right. The clothes didn't seem to allow for his body depth. It was as if someone had seen a picture of a sweatshirt and jeans and sewn the clothing from just looking at the photo. They looked extremely uncomfortable, and they were dyed wrong. “As he and I approached each other on the road, I saw that he had the biggest eyes I have ever seen—bright, bright blue. As we came closer, I said hello in French and he put his hooded head down, but still tried to look up at me as if he was curious. He said nothing. We both walked on and after about 20 steps I looked back. He was gone. Just plain gone.


"About two weeks later, the same thing happened again, except it was a different person of about the same age—19 or 20 year old. He was wearing the same clothing as the other young man. His skin was white instead of olive, his eyes were huge, almond shaped and also bright, bright blue. When we were about to pass each other, I once again said hello, and he stuttered and said the same greeting back. I slowed down to talk with him, but he was blushing so much, I moved on. I again looked back, and once again he was gone.


"I asked in the village about these two, but no one had seen them. Here's my theory: what better place for a history student to study history than to walk the road through its various eras. Not to talk to anyone, not to be seen, just to walk the road to see conditions at various times throughout history. Could these have been time travelers on a history assignment?"


One of those poignant and heartbreaking letters we ever received starts like this: "In the early summer of 1968, my daughter and I drove to New Mexico to visit some friends who had a small ranch there, before going west to meet my husband.


"Leaving Taos, we drove to Flagstaff and waited there until the early evening, to cross the Mojave desert at night. About two hours outside of Flagstaff, my daughter began to shout that she saw a spaceship in the sky. How did she know what it was?


"The sky was unusually cloudy, and I looked to where she was pointing and saw first two and then three lights moving rapidly in the sky, turning at 90 degree angles, pulsating and disappearing. I decided to pull off the road onto a dirt trail I saw to the right, leading into the desert.


"We watched the sky together, she in the back seat and I in front, when suddenly in front of the car there appeared a huge, dark and glowing object with a partial row of lights in the middle.


"The next thing I remember is my breath being knocked out of me as I somehow went through the windshield of the car. I remember looking back for an instant and the car was completely empty of myself or my daughter, and I was stepping into an opening in a vehicle.

"I couldn't see my daughter, and I asked in terror about her. 'She's going to be all right,' was what I heard in the center of my mind, and I was strangely soothed and unusually happy.


"These beings were tall, about six and a half feet, their skin was silvery." This description sounds like the "tall whites" that the medium Glennys MacKay remembers healing her. "I had a feeling of love or long lost family; it was almost like a homecoming. They kept saying 'Welcome, welcome!' in my mind, and laughing. They started speaking to me about my individual history. There was such love flowing through them. This wasn't exactly like words, but were rather images or sound pictures that moved between us.


"Then they took me to a room that contained the ship's driving mechanism. In front of me was a huge crystal, perhaps three feet across in the middle. It looked like two pyramids placed base to base, although at times it seemed multifaceted and totally brilliant and jewel-like, suspended in the air. They told me to put my mind into the crystal and as I did, I’d be able to learn how to fly the ship."

It's interesting to note that a friend of ours who was also taken out of his moving car and suddenly found himself inside a UFO also saw this exact type of diamond-shaped structure there. He tried to duplicate it many times over the years.


"Then they said, 'Time to return to earth.' Frantically, I panicked and asked about my daughter and was soothed, again by them saying she was okay. Then they said they were sorry, but didn’t say why, and there was great love.


"As we moved to the exit, they said my name again several times, and something about 'soul lineage.' I was reluctant to go, but the next thing I knew I had gone through the car windshield again, and found myself hanging out of the window gasping for air. I had been crying and was covered with sweat.


"My daughter was in the back seat crying. She told me never to touch her again, and that she knew who I was and she hated me. I tried to calm her and ask what had happened to her and she shouted, 'I’ll never tell you! Leave me alone!'


"I had a notebook in the car, and before we left, I forced myself to write these things down as I remembered them. I looked at the stars in a daze. It was almost midnight, and we had lost about two and a half hours.


"I drove on to California then, as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t tell anyone ever, and swore to myself to never discuss it.

"One night my daughter woke up screaming and I went to her bed and she said very factually, 'Mommy, I'm going to die. The spaceship people told me so. They said little bugs had gotten into my body and they were sorry, but there was nothing they could do since I’m a little girl.' Then she went back to sleep.


"This frightened me beyond belief. That morning, she woke up with a high fever and had severe joint swelling. I took her to the hospital and she was diagnosed as having rheumatoid arthritis, yet they weren’t too sure. They wondered if she’d been exposed to radiation. She was in great pain.

"I drove back to Texas and put her in the hospital there, only to find out that she had a very rare cancer of the nervous system, neuroblastoma, and it had metastasized, and she had just a few months to live. She lived until September of 1969.


"Before her death, she began to draw extraordinary pictures that were compared to those of a ten year old, even though she was only three and a half. She began to compose poetry, which I sometimes wrote out for her. The doctors were amazed and thought it might be the chemotherapy, but were not sure.


"The day after her funeral, a friend of mine who was a graduate student at the University of Texas called me from Austin in hysterics, saying that she had to drive to Houston immediately and tell me something that had happened.


"Without glasses, she was legally blind, but she drove anyway. I didn't think I could handle another emotional crisis, since I was in such grief—however, she came that day.


"We went for pizza, and she told me what had happened. She said that two nights before at about 2:20 in the morning, she was awakened by a noise and then saw her roof begin to dissolve. In the air above, she saw a type of spaceship.


"Two tall beings appeared, and in between them was my daughter. They told her they hadn’t been able to get through to me because of something, but to let me know that my daughter was okay and was with them! She thought that she’d gone completely insane. At that point in her story, I broke my promise to myself and told her what had happened that night in the desert, and we both cried and cried."

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We want to thank Anne Strieber for permission to print this article. www.unknowncountry.com

THURSDAY'S CHILD