This book, which fundamentally changed the way we understand close encounters and alien abductions, is presented here with a new introduction by the author.

Telling the reader over and over you’re not crazy and you’ve led a successful life is just distracting. When I read it I was living in Austin which is where Whitley Streiber was living when he claims these events happened. On December 26 we spent a happy morning breaking in his new sled, then went cross-country skiing in the afternoon.

Discover your next non-fiction read and brilliant book gifts in the Profile newsletter, and find books to help you live well with Souvenir Press. I could easily have gotten up and read a book or listened to the radio or gone for a midnight walk in the snow. The book is based on the experiences of Whitley Strieber, who experiences "lost time" and terrifying flashbacks, which hypnosis undertaken by Budd Hopkins later links to an alleged encounter with aliens.

In his popular UFO books, Communion and Transformation , Whitley Strieber noted his uncertainty whether the ``visitors'' who allegedly abducted him were extraterrestrials, fairies or something else. The author also ignores that in several of the hypnotized sessions a third person, Budd Hopkins, was allowed to sit in and question the subject. The crux of the book revolves around retellings of vaguely remembered "occurrences" from years past or childhood. In the middle of the night of December 26 -- 1 do not know the exact time -- I abruptly found myself awake.With Whitley beside me for the subsequent session, I began to paint the image on a wooden prepared panel, going through the same process as for the drawing, until Whitley finally said the image was exact. Before becoming an author, he worked at an advertising agency from 1970 to 1977, going from account supervisor to vice president.

And yet this parallax is actually strong enough to suggest that something unusual is in fact at the root of his stories. Where the book lost me was in the odd discussions of ancient gods and reports of "visitors" throughout the ages, and some of the claims from the colloquy of abductees. Think page after page of a person contradicting herself, saying she can’t remember, and going off on unrelated tangents. As I sketched, he would indicate how to change the portrait so that it would more match what he saw.On December 26, 1985, at a secluded cabin in upstate New York, Whitley Strieber went siding with his wife and son, ate Christmas dinner leftovers, and went to bed early. The sincerity and detail of Strieber's account of his experiences is powerful and it will force every reader to ask: what are the aliens trying to communicate, are they here to guide and transform mankind, has the greatest mystery of our time been solved? Still, I was very curious and began going out into the woods at night from our little upstate New York cabin to try to somehow re-engage. The way that they have a "hive mind" and the similar jumpsuits, and even the asiatic looks of the visitors can all seem to be projected fears of communism during the Cold War. Even for non-believers, if you simply treat this as a good read, it is an incredible, powerful and sometimes uncomfortable story.