February 14, 2016 — Whitley Strieber

[SheaOlmsford]

Strieber appears to suffer from dissociative identity disorder due to his traumatization at the "secret MKULTRA school" as a child. The narcissism seems to relate to the controlling "superego" aspect of that, or more simply put, his way of not facing and healing that trauma by taking refuge in power-fantasies of being the Chosen One of God, etc, etc. Fantasies which Kripal, IMO, is being highly irresponsible in feeding, by comparing him to St Paul, and by validating his persecution complex repeatedly through the book. In order to generate better book sales, no less.


You're welcome, and thanks. I skimmed that piece when I posted the link here and I feel a bit embarrassed by it now. Specifically by how much I gave Whitley the benefit of the doubt back then, and more generally, by how much the piece is padded with theoretical/philosophical observations and what one commenter called "navel-gazing." With Prisoner of Infinity, I try to boil it down to reporting and analyzing the data (as well as presenting autobiographical experiences as occasional counterpoints) and minimize the extrapolation. So much of this data really does speak for itself.


Strieber as a camp follower is an interesting analogy. He is going wherever the Disinfo War Wagon goes to peddle his wares. He may also be selling small-pox blankets to natives.

I would be interested to speak to this young woman. Has she written about her experience since, or is that material still online (I think most or all of the Strieber forum stuff is archived)?

I know someone else who was bullied and then banned from there for questioning Whitley.

I am sorry but I lost touch with the Secret School stories disheartened woman perhaps 20 years ago now. The forum, such as it was, is long gone. So this has just become an anecdote with no factual testimony to back it up. Yet I tend to believe her.

To me, THE SECRET SCHOOL, if read from the knowledge and viewpoint of 2016, is a dead give-away that Whitley was simply using the current popular topics of the time to continue the fictionalization of his own life story. Unfortunately, from the 2016 vantage point, much of what he wrote simply could not have happened.

 

[Honey-Pot]

This is doubly interesting in light of Whitley's insistence that it was Anne who served to remind him never to dismiss his encounter with the Master of the Key as a figment of his imagination... So many layers of intrigue and inconsistency to this; Strieber's "body of lies" is like the whole UFO mystery in microcosm.

Here is a post from George Wingfield about Strieber:

Twenty years ago I sat next to Whitley’s charming wife Anne on a long bus ride when we were, together with Whitley, attending a UFO conference in Brisbane, Australia. I knew Whitley quite well back then but hadn't met Anne before. We talked at length. Having recently read Communion, I said naively that it must have been quite terrifying for her living with Whitley in that house in the woods near Accord (Ulster County) NY during the time he was virtually under siege by aliens. I said that the frequent presence of such intruders both outside in the dark with the security lights going on and off, and also inside --sometimes in the bedroom during the night-- must have been enough to terrify most folk out of their wits. Anne looked at me and smiled. She said "Oh, no, that's just Whitley ..... I never see a thing." She went on to say --in so many words-- that all this was in Whitley's head and no one else experienced any of the sheer Gothic terror which he so masterfully describes in 'Communion'. She didn't actually say it was fiction but I was left in little doubt of that. Out of loyalty to Whitley she would most likely deny any of this in public.

OP post is here... Click the Up Arrow just above.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Maybe what you think she meant is not what she meant. Maybe she meant it was all an internal experience. Real, but not something you would see if you were present.

I wouldn't presume to guess, except to say that I find it difficult to believe she would betray her husband and his reputation in that fashion to a total stranger.

 

[Honey-Pot]

I wouldn't presume to guess, except to say that I find it difficult to believe she would betray her husband and his reputation in that fashion to a total stranger.

My guess is Anne knew that George was already friends with Whitley, since these two had spent "bar time" together at previous events.

Here is a "happy hour" story George learned from Whitley:

You ask how I know that Whitley was always a practical joker? Well, Whitley Strieber told me that himself when we were at a UFO conference in Pensacola Beach/Gulf Breeze in 1997. Don’t get me wrong --I like Whitley but you certainly don’t want to believe everything he says. He is usually the life and soul of the party and always the center of attention. Over a few drinks in the bar he told me of some of the practical jokes he had played and just how credulous some folk are.

One spoof I remember he recounted was when he was telling a group of fans about flying on Concorde, the supersonic airliner, which was much more expensive than any other transatlantic flights. He told them that the huge G forces meant that passengers all had to be strapped in as they accelerated to Mach 2 and one was unable to move. “What”, one woman inquired, “did you do if you urgently needed to go to the bathroom?” Whitley told her that Concorde had an ingenious mobile toilet that could be moved by cables into position under any seat where it was needed. No one ever questioned something like this which he said with an absolutely straight face and there were many other outrageous tales of this sort. We laughed until I almost cried at some of his reminiscences.

Click the Up Arrow above to see the OP

 

[Constance]

Sorry, but I don't think George Wingfield's personal anecdotes re Strieber can be much help in understanding Strieber's dissociative personality disorder. Indeed, the social role he played in bars and at parties might have been a welcome relief (a time-out) from the states of his mind he experienced at other times. I'm guessing that the horror novels he wrote were instances in which he attempted to get some control over and discharge deeply troubling ideations that plagued him, perhaps still do. ('guessing' because I've never read any of those novels, preferring to protect my own peace of mind from other peoples' nightmares)

 

[Constance]

. . . I personally don't see how PBS or any other national syndicate documentaries could get made and aired that are not part of a disinformation campaign, because I am more or less convinced the mass media is 100% controlled for this purpose.

I agree. I also think that almost all of what gets expressed in the mass media concerning AI also falls into a pattern of disinformation concerning the supposed hopeless fallibility of human perception and the inadequacy of human thought to deal with the world we live in. Many people alive today, at least in the West, have been persuaded that the best thing we can do with ourselves is to replace our species with AI as soon as possible. I see that as a staggering accomplishment of materialist/physicalist/objectivist thinking trickled down from the still-dominant scientific paradigm.

Regarding the notion that false memories can be created by the simple means shown in the doc, maybe, maybe not. People are highly suggestible, and the section about curing phobias in Amsterdam struck me as legit. And yes, it is all deeply disturbing, because what can be controlled, will be controlled. They are selling us our own voluntary bondage.

Curing phobias is one thing. Healing people from the consequences of childhood abuse as well as from violence experienced in adulthood is another thing altogether. There are no simple 'fixes' to regaining emotional health, peace of mind, and self-efficacy in those circumstances. Covering up rather than addressing the realities of abuse is a recipe for increasing the sickness of the world we live in today.

As for "the Memory Hacker program that has nothing to do with the top secret work." I don't even know what you mean by this. Do you envision that the secret military and intelligence scientific experimentation that goes on is somehow happening in a void, entirely unconnected to the sort of science that enters into the mainstream? If it is all a continuum ~ and how could it not be? ~ the scientists, groups, institutions and types of research that receive grants and that wind up being promoted on PBS documentaries would be those that are continuing the work of the military-intelligence complex by making it public, and always with some strategic aim in mind.

Well said, and I agree whole-heartedly.


Also, I wanted to comment on this comment of yours in an earlier post:

"I don't think the reason for the meme-seeding has anything to do with extraterrestrials, frankly."

I think much of it does have to do with extraterrestrials given the frequent (and I think sound) responses of personnel in the military, the think tanks, and the security agencies, as well in the thinking of ordinary people, that the evident physicality and high technology demonstrated in many modern ufo encounters has strongly suggested the presence of an advanced off-planet species in earth's environment. Given the best-investigated cases, I think the ETH has been, as the COMETA experts expressed it, the 'best available hypothesis' concerning the accumulated hard data. The think tanks advising the US government, such as Rand and Battelle, addressed very soon the potentially chaotic social, political, economic, and cultural consequences that could be expected if the ETH turned out to be valid. We still don't know with certainty that it is valid, but there are no sound scientific reasons to discount it, and the silence from most institutional public science and the PTB is still deafening, at least in the US. So it makes sense that the PTB would in this context be motivated to seek means by which to efficiently control perceptions and thoughts of ordinary people in advance of the consequences of self-disclosure by those behind a significant percentage of ufo phenomena. Propagation of the abduction meme might well have been a device of the mind controllers to discourage openness to (and trust in) any off-planet intelligences in case they ever showed up on the ground and publicly addressed the problems of our self-destructive current 'civilization' and the solutions required to solve them.

 

[Liminalist]

Thanks for the link to the Wingfield comments and thread. I will try and peruse that material.

Constance: can you share this "accumulated hard data" and/or explain why the ETH is the best explanation for it?

While I have no problem seeing the Universe as full of sentience, and even, at a pinch, the idea that other planetary energies or consciousnesses might interact with us in some form, the notion of space travel strikes me as an ego- (i.e., delusion-) based literalization of something far subtler and more elusive. I sincerely doubt if space travel exists anywhere in the entire universe, outside of infantile- fantasies and the entertainment they give rise to. A bold statement for sure, but one based on a strong impression that the drive to "conquer space," to leave one's planet (due to dissatisfaction with one's existence and/or supposedly insurmountable but self-generated problems) is an ego-drive, and not a soul or psyche drive, hence is always doomed to frustration and failure (thank God). The psyche strains to be rooted in its home, in matter, not to fly through the heavens like Whitley on acid!

Of course, I may be wrong; but even if it were possible, it's hard to imagine such ET beings driven to build ships to fly about the galaxy in assisting others with their evolution would not be deeply neurotic imperialists like Captain Kirk & crew (No offense to any Trekkers intended).

 

[Honey-Pot]

I also think that almost all of what gets expressed in the mass media concerning AI also falls into a pattern of disinformation concerning the supposed hopeless fallibility of human perception and the inadequacy of human thought to deal with the world we live in. Many people alive today, at least in the West, have been persuaded that the best thing we can do with ourselves is to replace our species with AI as soon as possible. I see that as a staggering accomplishment of materialist/physicalist/objectivist thinking trickled down from the still-dominant scientific paradigm.

You can thank Kurzweil and his disciples for this madness... it would be very interesting to investigate the media and money that has published and backed his ideas. You would find a lot of answers about who all is Oz.

 

[Honey-Pot]

Thanks for the link to the Wingfield comments and thread.

Here's another wild story about Whitley from George Wingfield...

Let me give you this story about Whitley Strieber which was told to me by Budd Hopkins. Some time before Communion was published in 1987 Whitley flew to New York and got in contact with Budd, who had by then published Missing Time (1981) and was about to publish Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods. Whitley wanted to meet Debbie Tomie (aka Kathy Davis; now Debbie Jordan-Kauble) who was Budd’s star abductee at that time and who undoubtedly believed that she had been abducted by aliens several times from her home in Indiana.

Debbie just happened to be in NYC staying at Budd’s and so Budd rather reluctantly allowed Debbie to go and meet him in a nearby restaurant. She was questioned by Whitley about every aspect of her abduction experiences for quite some time. Whitley kept peering at her in a strange way until she eventually asked him “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

At first he denied that he had been looking at her strangely but after she pressed him repeatedly, he said “Well, haven’t we met somewhere before?” No, she said, and she didn’t think she had ever seen him before that day.

Whitley continued to look very strangely at Debbie until she became really quite upset. Again she pressed him, asking “If we did meet before, where was that?” Very slowly and reluctantly he replied “It was on one of the ships…” It then dawned on her that he was implying that they had somehow met aboard a flying saucer at a time both of them had been simultaneously abducted.

She was shocked but soon realized that Whitley still hadn’t finished delivering this bombshell. She demanded to know more and became quite angry with him. Feigning extreme reluctance Whitley Strieber then said that it wasn’t all of her that he had met: what he had seen on the “ship” was just her head floating in a vat of liquid together with other body parts.

At this Debbie became extremely upset and got up to leave. She didn’t tell Whitley that she disbelieved him but said she never wanted to see him again. Then she went out of the restaurant and returned to Budd’s place. Obviously it wasn’t going to be to anyone’s advantage to publicize this absurd episode.

Whitley Strieber was always a practical joker since he was young. He would often tell his victims some tall story with a completely straight face and never for a moment concede the story was made up. His vivid imagination and his writing skills have always been his passport to success. You may ask me whether I should have believed Budd Hopkins? Well, yes, but not everything he told me --though Budd certainly appeared to believe that alien abductions genuinely did happen.

Click the above Up Arrow to go to the OP

 

[Liminalist]

That one I had heard before. Grisly.

 

[Honey-Pot]

That one I had heard before. Grisly.

For those that haven't seen this. More from George Wingfield:

There can be no doubt whatever that Whitley Strieber’s book Communion –A True Story (1987) is anything other than a work of fiction. He did, of course, listen carefully to the stories told by other supposed alien abductees --or their memories of abduction resulting from hypnotic regression—before he sat down to write Communion.

Before he jumped on the alien abduction bandwagon Whitley Strieber was regarded as a leading writer of horror fiction and some regarded him as the equal of Stephen King. One of his earlier horror stories was titled Pain and in this one can find many parallels to his alien abduction story in Communion. This commentary on the similarity is taken from a review that was published several years ago on the net:-

Whitley, as it turned out, had left a significant paper trail in this regard:
a story, "Pain," that appeared in a 1986 hardcover anthology, of horror stories,
Cutting Edge. "Pain" is a remarkable prefiguration of Communion's distinctive
addition of S&M themes to the traditional UFO mixture-as-before. Here is the moment
in Communion when Strieber reveals how he was raped by aliens:

[Aboard the saucer] the next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and
extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end.
It was a least a foot long, narrow and triangular in structure. They inserted this
thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own.
Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the
time I had the impression that I was being raped, and for the first time I felt
anger.

In "Pain" the narrator, a novelist like Strieber, tells of his besotted passion for
a professional dominatrix, who belongs to an ancient, alien race that had fed on
human pain throughout history. They were in charge of the Roman Empire, arranged
the Holocaust, assassinated Kennedy, and now their agent, cruel Janet O'Reilly,
puts Strieber's hero through a standard bondage-and-domination scenario.

The textual parallels between "Pain" and Communion are extensive. Could it be
that Strieber, having made the imaginative equation between the "archetypal
abduction experience" and the ritual protocols of bondage and domination, realized
he'd hit a vein of ore untapped by previous UFOlogists? Strieber's alternative
explanation is that the story represents the first surfacing of memories repressed
by the aliens, who had given Strieber a similar hazing only days before "Pain" was
written.

Another fiction of Whitley's was his account of how he was pinned down by the gunfire from multiple murderer Charles Whitman who shot and killed 15 people and wounded 31 others from a 27-story high tower on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin in 1966. This claim, which Strieber made during the 1980s, was eventually nailed by a researcher from Texas who knew him and who was able to prove that he could not possibly have been in Austin at the time. Whitley was then forced to concede that his account was imaginary --or else a false memory, which, he suggested, had been implanted by the aliens.

Click the Up Arrow above to see the OP

 

[Honey-Pot]

This is an inside joke post. You really need to read George's post above this one [quoted below] to begin to understand. This is hilarious!!! Just click the Up Arrow just below to go to the thread... and you can find George's post just above the one below...

> Are you reading this, John? (If so, please say ‘Hi’)

Hi George, I am and hi, hope you're well.
Glad you enjoyed Mirage Men.
* Yes it's really me, you once called me a poodle-faker.

Also, Whitley's podcasts with LMH and others about the Roswell Slides is just sooo precious! He can dive ever so deep into the LotR caves of "precious"...

Do you know much about the Roswell Slides of 2015?

 

[Honey-Pot]

As for "the Memory Hacker program that has nothing to do with the top secret work." I don't even know what you mean by this. Do you envision that the secret military and intelligence scientific experimentation that goes on is somehow happening in a void, entirely unconnected to the sort of science that enters into the mainstream? If it is all a continuum ~ and how could it not be? ~ the scientists, groups, institutions and types of research that receive grants and that wind up being promoted on PBS documentaries would be those that are continuing the work of the military-intelligence complex by making it public, and always with some strategic aim in mind.

I know something about university research including some that involve military sponsorship, and I can assure you the kind of research I'm talking about by MKU will not ever be done in a university setting. This kind of research is too highly classified and is extremely controversial in nature to risk any possibility of public disclosure. There is no continuum with these kinds of highly controversial projects in a university setting, because it's never done there. These are need to know and closeted from anyone else even within the CIA, military, NSA, etc. You're being very naive to think any of these researchers will ever know about those top secret programs.

If you think otherwise, then all you need to do is research everyone on that Memory Hacker program. Please show me their association or connection to *any* classified project. The CIA, NSA, and military intelligence services will be decades ahead of what Memory Hackers talked about with devious and frightening applications that will never see the light of day with a public record or disclosure.

If you can thread the connections to MKU with these people, then I'm certainly happy to be found mistaken and corrected. You may know something about this that I don't know or understand. I have an open mind about it.

 

[Constance]

Constance: can you share this "accumulated hard data" and/or explain why the ETH is the best explanation for it?

Yes, but I'm sure it won't be anything you haven't read about in the ufo research history. It comprises radar data (ground and aerial radar) consistent with observations by eyewitnesses in the air, on the ground (at airforce bases and civilian airports), and on ships at sea); ground trace evidence and anomalous effects on soil and plants corresponding with eyewitness testimony of ufo landings; electromagnetic anomalies such as the ability of some ufo pilots' or controllers to suspend terrestrial scrambled jets' weapons-firing systems, communication systems, and systems controlling the terrestrial craft; physical effects on humans coming into close proximity to ufos; the countless reports by pilots, air traffic controllers, military and police observers on the ground, scientists and aeronautical specialists on the ground, ordinary people on the ground, and also other pilots in the sky of speeds and maneuvres impossible for terrestrial aircraft. Also the short-lived capability of jets sent to pursue ufos to 'lock-on' to the anomalous craft. Consistently observed effects on animals in proximity to ufos are additional evidence of the physical reality of many ufos.

The reason why the ETH is 'the best available hypothesis' is because so far there is no evidence of an alternative explanation for the technological capacities demonstrated by some percentage of ufos.

While I have no problem seeing the Universe as full of sentience, and even, at a pinch, the idea that other planetary energies or consciousnesses might interact with us in some form, the notion of space travel strikes me as an ego- (i.e., delusion-) based literalization of something far subtler and more elusive. I sincerely doubt if space travel exists anywhere in the entire universe, outside of infantile- fantasies and the entertainment they give rise to. A bold statement for sure, but one based on a strong impression that the drive to "conquer space," to leave one's planet (due to dissatisfaction with one's existence and/or supposedly insurmountable but self-generated problems) is an ego-drive, and not a soul or psyche drive, hence is always doomed to frustration and failure (thank God). The psyche strains to be rooted in its home, in matter, not to fly through the heavens like Whitley on acid!

I think human curiosity is a normal trait of consciousness and mind embodied in a physical world and that other species would be likely to develop the desire and capability to travel beyond their home planets out of curiosity, also sometimes perhaps out of need for minerals or other substances no longer available to them at home or out of need to evacuate the home planet in conditions of degrading environments. I'm not a space exploration enthusiast, though I am interested in what's being learned about Mars as a once habitable planet that is perhaps still inhabited by resilient species of life living underground. What interests me most is the possibility of learning the history of conditions and expressions of life on Mars, especially what appears from the JPL imagery to have been an extended intelligent, expressive, artistic motivation over a long period of time to preserve images in stone (and, it also appears, ceramics) of a variety of species that have evidently lived on Mars as well as on earth. I am appalled by the assumption on this planet that Mars is a 'dead' planet and by the widespread appetite to claim that planet for our own uses and profit. I think it is our obligation to solve the problems we've created on our own planet and make life here worth living for all the people and animals on it. If anything, we might provide practical aid to contemporary Martians in restoring their magnetosphere or some other significant task, but only if we’re asked to do so. That's of course if I had the power to decide what will happen.

Of course, I may be wrong; but even if it were possible, it's hard to imagine such ET beings driven to build ships to fly about the galaxy in assisting others with their evolution would not be deeply neurotic imperialists like Captain Kirk & crew (No offense to any Trekkers intended).

I don't find it hard to believe that older societies than ours in the universe might have grown wiser morally as well as politically and economically and that some of them might use their resources to support non-destructive life elsewhere, and to prevent the waste of a prolific planet such as this one. I find Robert Hastings's history of ufo intrusions over and interference with nuclear sites, beginning over the Hanford atomic plant in 1941 and continuing into our time, to be the most logical explanation for the continuing pressure of the modern ufo phenomenon after seven decades. As old as the universe is, and as fragile as life is, I'd be surprised if there weren't peaceable advanced species associated with one another throughout the universe over long ages (the others having destroyed themselves along their broken way).

 

[Constance]

Here's another wild story about Whitley from George Wingfield...

Let me give you this story about Whitley Strieber which was told to me by Budd Hopkins. Some time before Communion was published in 1987 Whitley flew to New York and got in contact with Budd, who had by then published Missing Time (1981) and was about to publish Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods. Whitley wanted to meet Debbie Tomie (aka Kathy Davis; now Debbie Jordan-Kauble) who was Budd’s star abductee at that time and who undoubtedly believed that she had been abducted by aliens several times from her home in Indiana.

Debbie just happened to be in NYC staying at Budd’s and so Budd rather reluctantly allowed Debbie to go and meet him in a nearby restaurant. She was questioned by Whitley about every aspect of her abduction experiences for quite some time. Whitley kept peering at her in a strange way until she eventually asked him “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

At first he denied that he had been looking at her strangely but after she pressed him repeatedly, he said “Well, haven’t we met somewhere before?” No, she said, and she didn’t think she had ever seen him before that day.

Whitley continued to look very strangely at Debbie until she became really quite upset. Again she pressed him, asking “If we did meet before, where was that?” Very slowly and reluctantly he replied “It was on one of the ships…” It then dawned on her that he was implying that they had somehow met aboard a flying saucer at a time both of them had been simultaneously abducted.

She was shocked but soon realized that Whitley still hadn’t finished delivering this bombshell. She demanded to know more and became quite angry with him. Feigning extreme reluctance Whitley Strieber then said that it wasn’t all of her that he had met: what he had seen on the “ship” was just her head floating in a vat of liquid together with other body parts.

At this Debbie became extremely upset and got up to leave. She didn’t tell Whitley that she disbelieved him but said she never wanted to see him again. Then she went out of the restaurant and returned to Budd’s place. Obviously it wasn’t going to be to anyone’s advantage to publicize this absurd episode.

Whitley Strieber was always a practical joker since he was young. He would often tell his victims some tall story with a completely straight face and never for a moment concede the story was made up. His vivid imagination and his writing skills have always been his passport to success. You may ask me whether I should have believed Budd Hopkins? Well, yes, but not everything he told me --though Budd certainly appeared to believe that alien abductions genuinely did happen.

Strieber is obviously a very sick man mentally. What he said to the woman in that 'anecdote' makes it clear that he is also a deeply sadistic man (not surprising given what I've read about his novels). Why is there still so much interest in this guy?

 

[kanakaris]

If both of you agree.

This would involve the shows from mid-2010 through October 2014, before Paracast+ kicked in.

The earlier shows would be more difficult, because ad breaks, while less frequent, were not as precisely timed.

I'm gonna do one episode to see how long it takes.
Will get back soon

 

[Liminalist]

I know something about university research including some that involve military sponsorship, and I can assure you the kind of research I'm talking about by MKU will not ever be done in a university setting. This kind of research is too highly classified and is extremely controversial in nature to risk any possibility of public disclosure. There is no continuum with these kinds of highly controversial projects in a university setting, because it's never done there. These are need to know and closeted from anyone else even within the CIA, military, NSA, etc. You're being very naive to think any of these researchers will ever know about those top secret programs.

If you think otherwise, then all you need to do is research everyone on that Memory Hacker program. Please show me their association or connection to *any* classified project. The CIA, NSA, and military intelligence services will be decades ahead of what Memory Hackers talked about with devious and frightening applications that will never see the light of day with a public record or disclosure.

If you can thread the connections to MKU with these people, then I'm certainly happy to be found mistaken and corrected. You may know something about this that I don't know or understand. I have an open mind about it.

I don't have time to look into the individuals in question to see their affiliations, but you are of course aware of the existence of undercover operatives. Timothy Leary has come up at this thread: he was a Harvard professor. John Mack worked at Harvard also. William Sargant, now known to have been involved in UK research for MK-ULTRA, was a respected public figure who wrote a best-selling book. Ewen Cameron was doing MK-ULTRA linked research in Canada publicly, and not in secret at all. In fact, a lot of this isn't secret, it just isn't picked up or validated by mainstream media sources and so it seems "woo-woo" to most people, who are simply uninformed and naturally don't want to see that they have been duped.

The larger program of research of which MK-ULTRA is (or was) part isn't restricted to torture or drug-dosing or to any specific area; its tentacles extent into probably just about every field of research, neurology, biology, nanotechnology, cybernetics, space travel, you name it. Science, like Religion, like Government, like Publishing or Mass Media, is probably far closer to being a tightly controlled and Monolithic institution than a bevy of independent groups doing unrelated research. There is a single goal, one that can be most easily summed up as social control (though I think it goes far deeper than merely social).

Well-meaning individuals may be able to enter into that Monolithic system of control, and for a time to do some good research or investigation, just as someone may become a cop or a lawyer with the best intentions in the world. But after a certain time, it becomes impossible to continue because, at the higher levels, entirely different interests and agendas are being pursued, those of the ruling class. At that point, the honest-intended person either quits, accepts their limitations and tries to do what little they can at that very low level, or, they take the paycheck, learn the handshakes, and get with the larger program.

Simply put: most scientific research requires funding, and where does the funding come from? We can do that math ourselves. It's not rocket science.

 

[Sue]

Whitley told her that Concorde had an ingenious mobile toilet that could be moved by cables into position under any seat where it was needed.

I could really use one of those. It sounds better than even the squatty potty. I don't even care if it's imaginary; in my dreams is where it would be the most useful. Maybe I secretly admire the Whitley after all.

 

[Burnt State]

Question: is Whitley Strieber more, less, or as dangerous as David Jacobs when it comes to inventing memes that have shaped Ufology in a poisonous manner?

 

[Liminalist]

Speaking personally, I don't think they are even comparable in terms of the depth (I don't want to say insidious-ness) of their influence. While I read Jacobs (Secret Life) and it certainly titillated my intellect, it didn't allow for the inception of any lasting beliefs or interpretations. Unlike Strieber, and I think the key difference is that between a supposed investigator embellishing or outright fabricating stories (and/or prey to his own delusional beliefs) and someone claiming and believing to be an experiencer of the phenomena being described. Jacobs could never approach anything like the teacher/guru status which Strieber attained, above all because he (Strieber) claimed to embody the contact experience (ie, be an avatar of the daimonic/divine).

BTW, I noticed this comment from a year ago:

I also think Whitley's a true trickster in our contemporary culture. He has framed a lot of the alien abduction phenomenon, and has admittedly attempted to con, confabulate, and just plain makes stuff up. Like Steve Greer, Linda Howe, Romanek etc. they're all in it for themselves, though Romanek's kind of out of it altogether now. These are the tricksters, bringing about disorder for a good many years now. Too bad about Howe, as her initial trajectory was to be a bold and detailed reporter. But she was also meddled with and went all weird, almost Bennewitz weird when you think about some of her statements and convictions.

Did you change your mind since then? (Referring to your comment at this thread that WS is not a real trickster figure.)