It is our privilege and pleasure to welcome the world-renowned author Whitley Strieber as our featured author for May.

Whitley has dedicated many decades of his life to investigating the paranormal and detailing his profound supernatural experiences for the world to read. In this excerpt from his book ‘A New World’ Whitley explores his extraordinary encounter with a hidden landscape during his stay on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; and the messages he received about the nature of the universe and the mysterious visitors that interact with our world.

Books by Whitley Strieber

Communion

A New World

Chapter Four, The Fields of Asphodel

During the weekend of July 19–22, 2019, I went to a place of great human suffering and incredible power. While there, I had extended, days-long access to another world, an experience that went far beyond anything else that has happened in this lifetime of strange and extraordinary experiences. I think that what happened offers a major clue about the origin of the visitors, and possibly also of their enigmatic human allies.

I had been invited to a small conference at the All Nations Gathering Center on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where I was to give a talk about The Afterlife Revolution. It was hosted by Dallas Chief Eagle and his wife Becky and organized by Mia Feroleto, publisher of New Observations Magazine.

Before going, I had learned some of the reservation’s history, but it had offered no clue about what was actually going to happen to me there. Like most people outside of American Indian culture, my awareness of the spiritual power of their religions was very limited. Being a Texas German, I was aware that my ancestors had a high opinion of their religion and spiritual development. Why, I did not know. I do now.

I also knew that Pine Ridge was the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre and the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973. On December 29, 1890, the US Army had opened fire on a group of 300 Lakota Sioux, killing 90 men and 200 women and children. In 1973, Wounded Knee was occupied by 200 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement in protest over corruption in the tribe’s government. This led to a siege that lasted two months that left two Lakota killed and fourteen wounded and two federal officers injured. I also learned that Oglala Lakota County was the poorest county in the United States, with an average annual income per person of just over $8,000. Officially, the average life expectancy on the Pine Ridge reservation is 66.81 years, but statistics attributed to the Pine Ridge hospital cite a life expectancy among women of 55 years and men 47 years. Suicide rates are high, especially among teens, driven by the sense of hopelessness that infects their lives like a virus. During the winter of 2015–2016, one 12-year-old girl killed herself because her family could not afford heat, and she could no longer bear the cold. Alcoholism affects 85% of the population. Drug abuse and crime are rampant, and living conditions are dreadful beyond anything I have ever seen in my life.

None of this is an accident or due to laziness or any such issue. It is because of the location. During the 19th century American Indian wars, the Lakota Sioux were intentionally confined to this place because it is so lacking in resources. Distances are long, so work off the reservation isn’t economical for most residents. Because of its isolation, lack of good farmland and general scarcity of exploitable resources, there are few jobs on it, contributing to a chronically high unemployment rate.

While I found an oppressed people there, I also found that it was a place of great human spiritual power, in fact, power beyond anything I have ever known anywhere. I have some idea of what this power is, which I will discuss in depth in a later chapter. I had not been on the reservation for more than a few hours before I began to feel it. And when I say feel, I am not talking about something vague—some sense of unusual energies. Far from it.

On my first morning there, when I happened to close my eyes during a drive of half an hour or so, I saw movement behind my closed lids—what looked like shadowy trees and rolling hills, but not the ones we were passing. Surprised, I opened them immediately. I couldn’t understand why I’d been seeing anything at all. When I closed them again, what I saw simply took my breath away. I sat there watching an entire second landscape flow past the car. Although it seemed to be twilit rather than sunny, the effect was so vivid it was like wearing a virtual reality headset.

I was flooded with strong, poignant and yet contradictory emotions. There was at once a sense of homecoming and homesickness. It wasn’t as if I was in two places at once, but rather looking out the windows of my heart into two worlds that have been locked forever in a secret embrace and seeing that wonderful, sweet thing for the first time.

As we drove along, I sang out the different features I was seeing. “There’s a creek over there, we’re passing under an arbor of trees, there are long hills on the horizon. Oops, the road’s gone off down the hill.” Among those in the car who heard me doing this was our very kind driver, Kevin Briggs, who unfortunately could not close his eyes and look as the others did. Conferees Alan Steinfeld, Ananda Bosman, Mia Feroleto and others did close their eyes. Some saw it vaguely, others not at all. Only Ananda and I saw it clearly.

Even though the image was shadowy, it was extremely detailed. I could pick out individual trees, fields, even a narrower version of the road we were on.

After a few moments, I realized that I was watching not another world altogether, but another version of the landscape we were passing through. It was a bit more rough, with occasional gorges and generally wider streams. The other road was not only narrower, it wasn’t graded. The result of this was that it sometimes wound off down a hill while we continued along the graded version in our world. This would leave me with the uncanny sensation that the car had taken flight.

The vision didn’t go on for just a few minutes, but for the entire time I was on the reservation. It continued whether I was riding in a car, walking, sitting or standing. For those three days, I was living in two landscapes at once. After I closed my eyes, it would take about thirty seconds for the other world to appear, but it did so reliably. When I was standing somewhere, I could look down and see grass and gravel that was not present in this world. I could bend down and look closely, even to the point of being able to count the number of petals on flowers and observe the details of grasses and the discolorations on stones. I could touch and smell nothing of the other world. In this sense, it was very much like out of body travel, which detaches you from those senses. I was not physical in that world, and I have to wonder if that might not be how our visitors experience this one. I tried using the sensing exercise as a tool for physically moving into the other world, but it didn’t work. Nevertheless, it is my strong sense that what we think of as technology is not what enables things like this to happen. I think that it’s something to do with attention, concentration and the brain, and possibly also requires the cooperation of an outside energy that is itself conscious. My thought is that my lifetime of doing the sensing exercise and the changes in my brain that have resulted have made me more able to see this other universe and, to a limited extent (so far), interact with it.

The changes I am referring to involve a brain area called the dorsal striatum. It contains two regions, the caudate and the putamen, which are connected by an area of white matter called the internal capsule. There is a study under way that suggests that the density of the white matter region may govern the degree to which an individual possesses intuitive sensitivities.

I have thought that meditation might somehow increase this density. The authors of the as-yet unpublished study don’t see any indication of this so far, but another study, published in Psychiatry Research in January of 2011 and entitled “Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional gray matter density” states, “Analyses in a priori regions of interest confirmed increases in gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus. Whole brain analyses identified increases in the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum in the study group compared with the controls.” If the dorsal striatum is also affected by meditation, it might explain why, over years of doing it, people seem to become so much more intuitive, as has happened in my case. My own brain has been observed to have a very dense internal capsule between the caudate and the putamen, but there is no premeditation MRI to compare with the one that is available. I do feel that fifty years of meditation has made changes that involve opening my mind to new areas of vision and new ways of seeing.

However, I would not ignore the power of the heart, either. While we now attribute thought and feeling exclusively to the brain, I think that the older vision of the body, with the heart as the emotional center, should not be dismissed. I say this because the whole experience was so emotionally powerful, and like we do so many emotions, I felt it in my heart, and it is in both head and heart that I carry it now.

There is energy involved, which I think is conscious and capable of deciding exactly what it wants and does not want to do. A big part of coming into communion with the visitors, I feel, is opening ourselves to the wishes of this energy and attempting to understand what it might need from us and serve its needs.

The “mindfulness practice” researchers found that the changes they detected came about rather quickly, after only eight weeks of meditation, so perhaps building a brain that is receptive to contact is not all that lengthy a process. The longer time, I think, would involve waiting for one’s little glow to be noticed.

My experience of this is that determination counts. You have to want it a lot and work hard for it before anything that really will work with you will show up.

To get darker, more exploitative aspects to appear, such as happened to Matt, all that is needed, it seems to me, is curiosity. Lack of preparation, though, is clearly not a good idea.

That preparation should include reading material about what it is like to live with the visitors. Authors such as John Mack and Kathleen Marden offer carefully researched texts, and Anne Strieber’s Communion Letters is a treasury of personal accounts. I would avoid channeled material, as there is never any way to know where it actually comes from, an outside source or the author’s imagination.

Beyond that, later in this book, I will explore the importance of coming to this with a strong, healthy soul. This conscious energy, as I have experienced it, is very reflective. If you feel fear, it will be fearful. If you conceal guilts, it will look right into you and at them. Having been face to face with the grays when I was still an unregarded soul, I can assure you that this is an incredible shock. Those glittering pop eyes burned into me. It was like facing goblins, and I felt like some deep part of me was about to be devoured. The ancient Greek aphorism “know thyself” is of critical and foundational importance to establishing a relationship with the visitors and all that comes with them. Later, I will go into some detail about how one uses it to build the sort of strong soul that will have no reason to find those penetrating eyes frightening.

I am purposely being a little vague here about who I mean—is it the strangely formed visitors I’m talking about, our own dead, or a sort of field of disembodied consciousness?

I don’t think that it’s useful to make such differentiations. Whatever aspect of it comes into contact with you, so does it all. Best to think of it as a vast field where different sorts of flowers grow, some of them appearing one way, others another way. No matter which way you go, you remain in the field.

A specific event that causes me to suspect that we are dealing not only with specific entities but a conscious field took place at the Contact in the Desert Conference on June 2, 2019. As I was on my way to attend a lecture by Dr. Jacques Vallee, I noticed an odd change in the atmosphere. It was as if the air pressure had dropped. My ears popped. Sound faded. I said something to the person beside me, who acted rather strangely. He seemed to be pretending that I wasn’t there. I thought perhaps he disapproved of me in some way. I went on to the lecture, and by the time I arrived, the sensation had faded.

Some weeks later, an attendee at the conference wrote me, “I was on my way to Jacques Vallee’s lecture when I saw Whitley coming down a side path in my direction, looking deep in thought. Our paths were totally going to cross. Just before we were about to intersect, I glanced down to check that I had my phone in my bag. A bright flash from Whitley’s direction caught the corner of my eye. Oddly, I thought, ‘That’s him flashing to another dimension.’ In the same instant, I looked up—sure enough, no Whitley. He was there, and then he wasn’t. It’s hard to describe how confusing and odd it felt. The atmosphere suddenly felt heightened, and the sound seemed to drop away. At the same time, a sense of immense great benevolence came over me, as if someone with kind good humor was reassuring me that everything was ok. It felt like a gift, meant for me. It felt like magic.” She then spent some time looking for me without success and moved on to the lecture. She and a friend were taking seats “when the next person entered. It was Whitley Strieber!” For my part, I only felt the change in atmospheric pressure that also affected her. I had no sense of moving through another universe, but perhaps when this happens, we leave any memories we have gathered there behind when we return. This would be one explanation for the ubiquitous experience known as missing time that is reported by close encounter witnesses. We are not being taken aboard spaceships at all but moved into the companion universe, and our memories of events there return with us only in fragmented or suppressed form, or not at all.

I must add that I also feel that sense of benevolence, which has, over the years, come to permeate my life.

It is important, I feel, to note her comment that “a sense of immense great benevolence came over me, as if someone with kind good humor was reassuring me that everything was ok.” I think that this may have been a moment of direct communication with the conscious field itself, rather than specific entities that are part of it. When I am in touch with it, there is always a sense of joy, even hilarity. Those moments never fail to remind me of Anne’s love of the 14 th century mystic Meister Eckhart and his statement that “God laughs and plays,” and of her own central teaching: “Have joy.” She adopted this because it was one of the very, very few things that the visitors have ever said to me in ordinary language. She felt that it was what lay beyond our suspicion and fear, just out of reach.

I think that my vision was opened to this other world at Pine Ridge by the action of conscious energy, not specific entities. I will say this: I have never had more fun in my life than I did while my mind was open to this vision. It was so fascinating, so tantalizing, so extremely interesting. It has absolutely inspired my curiosity and made me want to somehow walk in those fields. Maybe I’d be unwelcome to the inhabitants or even devoured by something, but maybe also by passing through the wall between our worlds, I might make a door that others could enter. I have been asking the energy for a chance to give it a try.

Having asked many times in my life for impossible things to happen and seeing them proceed to unfold (always to my great astonishment), I don’t think that this entirely unreasonable and absurd request is at all impossible to fulfill. We shall see.

The other world was just as complex as this one, with streams, trees, fields, gorges, grasses and flowers and a sky complex with flowing clouds. In general, though, I didn’t see many structures, and no people. From time to time, I’d see a house or cabin. Sometimes a white square would flash on the distance then quickly blink out. Was that a person, perhaps distorted by some quirk of consciousness that we don’t yet understand?

When I looked up with my eyes closed in the car, I saw the sky and passing clouds. When I opened them, there was the ceiling. The weather in the other reality was similar but not the same. It seemed more unsettled. There were storm clouds there that were not present here. The moon was waning and gibbous in both realities, but in the other seemed to me to be a bit less gibbous, as if it had been full starting on about the 13th rather than the 16th , which was true here. Over the weekend that I was on the reservation, it was rising late at night, but when I closed my eyes, it was well risen in the other reality by about half past nine.

Even stranger, when I opened them, for a few moments there was a sort of hazy glow where the moon had been in the other world. This would slowly fade into the normal night sky. I wondered, then, how close I was to slipping into the other reality.

On my second day on the reservation, I had the privilege and honor of being allowed to witness an hour of a private family ritual that I found to be among the most sacred things I have ever experienced. It involves chanting and drumming and dancing. It was deeply moving to me.

The dancers fast and dance over a period of days. In the hour I was allowed to be there, I danced as well, entering the ceremony as best I could. The chanting stirred my heart and my soul, the drums shook my blood. When I closed my eyes, the area where the ritual I was watching was taking place became an empty meadow. I could still hear the drumming, but it seemed to now be coming from the right, not the left. When I looked to my right, where the new source seemed to be coming from, I could see the edge of a low hill. The sound seemed to be below it. When I opened my eyes, the hill was no longer there, the meadow was again filled with dancers and the only drumming was coming from the left.

At one point, I noticed people looking up and pointing. But what could it mean? How could they not pay attention to such an event as this? Still, I was curious. I looked up, too, and there at the top of the clear blue sky was a small object. It was light tan in color and seemed quite high. Was it a balloon? I watched it for a few minutes, but it didn’t go anywhere or do anything—just hung there, motionless and silent.

I kept my feelings inside, but I did think that this was the visitors. I can’t say that I felt their presence, which has sometimes happened in the past when I have seen their devices, but my initial reaction was that they were there to honor the ritual. They would have known that I would write about it.

I asked around about the object. Some of the people thought it might be an FBI drone, but others said that they were seeing beams and little balls of light coming out of it. However, the FBI keeps a close watch on these people. The Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 was viewed as an insurrection against the United States. So maybe the FBI was watching and maybe they would have used a drone. As for me, I watched the object off and on for a total of about fifteen minutes but did not see any unusual phenomena associated with it, except for the fact that it was motionless to the point of being uncanny. The eye expects things in the sky to move, however slightly. This did not. I was reminded of the UFO footage taken by fighters from the carrier Nimitz in 2004 and released in 2017. The objects on those videos are not aerodynamic but held aloft in some other way. This object looked exactly like that. Others saw similar objects at various other times during the conference, so my thought here was that this was indeed the visitors. In September of 2019, the US Navy admitted that they were indeed unknowns.

It remained motionless for too long to be a balloon. Even if it was motionless only for the time I observed it, that would be too long for one. There were balloons being released as part of an experiment in Sioux Falls, but that city is to the east of Pine Ridge, and the winds that day were out of the west.

When I left, it was still there, still motionless. Individuals who left after I did confirmed that it was still in the sky at that time. When it did finally depart, it moved away slowly and was seen again over other parts of the reservation.

That is also quite a long time for a drone to be hovering without being returned for a recharge. When they hover, they aren’t absolutely still. Neither are they completely silent. I have been unable to find any commercially available drones that can remain aloft more than two hours. This was the limit, as of the summer of 2019, of the longest duration drone, the HYBRiX.20.

Still, although I do believe that the object was an unknown, I can’t rule out the possibility that the FBI has silent, long duration drones that can hover for hours. I don’t believe it, but I can’t rule it out.

This was all pretty strange, even for me. Strange and wonderful. What happened next, though, was even stranger. Led by a member of the American Indian Movement, who was also one of the last direct descendants of somebody who had survived the 1898 massacre, a group of us went to the Wounded Knee memorial on the reservation. As I stood looking down at some of the graves, another member of the conference stood beside me, also looking down at them. I was vaguely aware that he had moved away then returned. I thought nothing of it until later when he came up to me and explained that, when he stood beside me, he could see down into the graves and could see the broken skeletons that were lying there in the earth.

As he explained this to me, I could see the puzzlement on his face. I don’t blame him, as I have never heard of anything like this, not in all the literature of high strangeness that I have read in my life. There are a few cases where people were said to be able to see through objects. In Greek myth, Lynceus of the Argonauts was supposedly able to see though walls and into the ground. But nowhere is there a story of somebody who could somehow confer this power on another person while not possessing it themselves. The visitors can pass through walls. When out of the body, so can we. But X-ray vision, especially X-ray vision by proxy—no, I believe that this may be the only such story that has ever been told. I think that all three stories, though—seeing into the other world, apparently popping into another dimension and conferring this power on the person standing beside me—all have to do with the presence of the same energy. I have to say, though, even as I write this, I can see those broken skeletons in my mind’s eye and feel the cruelty and shame of the massacre.

When we went to the nearby Badlands one evening, I found myself still able to see the other world there, too. I immediately noticed that hills were not as dramatic. This would mean that there has not been as much erosion there as here. When I looked down at the ground, I could see more grasses there than here, also. So the geologic history of the other world might be less violent, but at the same time, it also appears to be less populated. I say this because the roads on the reservation in this world are graded and in the other world they are not. I kept hoping that I would see a vehicle, but I never did. Had I done so, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was horse drawn. This is because the roads in the other world were sometimes unpaved, and the tracks in them were narrow, suggesting wagon wheels. The paved areas were black like macadam.

As I left the reservation on Monday, I also left the other world behind. By the time we were twenty miles from Rapid City, I could no longer see it. On the plane back to Los Angeles, I gazed out the window at the gentle landscape far below and thought long thoughts about my strange life and the strangeness of life in general, as it was being lived in the cities and towns we were passing over. I had left the greatest mystery of my life behind. I’d be a fool, though, if I didn’t live a “never say never” life, so for all I know, it’s going to return to visibility sometime. I regretted not being able to enter it. To do that, however, I knew that I was going to need to find out more.

There are many instances in literature of people encountering other realities. Matt and his mother saw a field from the Pleistocene at the end of his runway. In his book, Hunt for the Skinwalker, Dr. Colm Kelleher describes an event that took place on the mysterious ranch that had been bought for study because of all the paranormal activity taking place there. The purchase, made by the government, was managed through billionaire Robert Bigelow’s foundation. On the afternoon that the scientists who were to take it over arrived, a remarkable event took place. Just before they arrived, a huge wolf came up out of a marsh and attacked some goats in a corral. The ranchers drove it off by shooting it, although the bullets did not seem to penetrate or draw blood. It leaped out of the corral and ran back into the marsh.

When the scientists arrived, they found its footprints, which led to the center of the marsh and then disappeared. Casts taken enabled them to estimate the weight of this ghost animal at 300 pounds. When I read this, I immediately realized that this was probably a dire wolf, another Pleistocene creature.

So is the other world in the past? I have no way of knowing that, but I do suspect from all I saw and all I have learned about it that it does not have the level of population or development that our world does, meaning that, in it, those creatures might not have gone extinct.

On the night I got home, I sat as I always do at 11 and took my attention to my physical sensation, letting my mind wander free. I asked to understand the place I had seen. I asked if it had a name. I never do more questioning than that. My experience is that I don’t need to beg, pray, do rituals or anything like that. What is important is to be prepared for a response that might happen very quickly and—above all—in some way that is liable to be quite asymmetric.

Nothing happened for a few days, and then on August 3rd, I had three dreams. They were what are known as lucid dreams. I’ve had a few of these in my life, but I don’t recall any that were as vivid as these.

In the first one, I was standing outside the All Nations Center at Pine Ridge with my eyes closed, looking at a beautifully curved wooden fence that had been one of the most striking features I’d seen during my time observing the other world. Three Indians came up to this fence. I could tell from their clothing that they were probably from the ritual I’d heard taking place in the other world. They looked human but had differently shaped faces than we do, and their eyes were somehow different. Was this because they were structurally mirror images? I don’t know how to asses that. All I can do is report what I saw.

They told me that, because this writing is going to help Pine Ridge in some way, I had been given my vision as a gift—which is all well and good, but I’d like to know who gave the gift and what had to be done to deliver it. And above all, what can we do to initiate contact from this direction?

The next thing I knew, I had two more dreams in rapid succession. They involved two of the few people left alive who were indirect witnesses to the Roswell event and know details of the bodies.

One of them said “Strieber-Greek” and warned me to be careful.

When I woke up, I wondered what in the world that might mean. I have nothing to do with Greece. Greeks play no role in my books. I am not Greek, speak no Greek and only know one or two Greeks, and them not very well. So I Googled the phrase—and got quite a surprise. There was a “Professor Strieber” mentioned in a science fiction novel called Uncle Ovid’s Exercise Book by Don Webb that was published in 1988. The passage in which my name appears contains the sentence, “The Greeks placed the coins in the mouths of their dead that they might pay Charon to ferry them over the Styx into the gray fields of Asphodel in the interior of the Earth.”

Asphodel in Homer’s Odyssey is the abode of the dead, twilit and leached of color. This is why the familiar little gray meadow flower one sees in some parts of Europe is called the asphodel. At first, I thought, “Oh, dear, perhaps I was being warned that I’m destined for some dreary land of the dead.” Then I was glad that the sensing exercise hadn’t worked to get passage!

However, Homer doesn’t only condemn Asphodel as the land of the unwanted dead. A less known passage in the Iliad describes it as a place fragrant with lovely flowers.

And indeed, in my third dream on that night, I saw the most gorgeous field of blue flowers I have ever beheld. In fact, it was the most enchanting shade of blue I can imagine—and, given that it was my dream, I mean that literally!

I made the decision to go with the Asphodel of the Iliad. I cannot imagine that those three marvelous men would be anywhere except in some sort of heaven. As for the two Roswell witnesses, they are lovely people, in my estimation sacred people. (Although they would laugh at that designation!) I don’t have the impression that the other world is imaginary. Nobody’s imagination can function like that for days, not producing an endless supply of detail that rich. Not to mention the fact that, when I examined something along the roadside—a flower, a tumble of stones—it was still there the next day, exactly as I remembered it. No, I think that I really was seeing into another reality, and I would suppose that others have, too, and its twilit appearance is what probably led them to conclude that it was inside Earth. But just as we have left the gods, sylphs, ghosts, fairy folk and our other interpretations of the visitors behind, perhaps it’s time to rethink other folklores and legends and consider instead that some of them at least might be attempts to explain phenomena that were really observed but could not be understood. I saw another version of the world. It was oddly like this one but not quite. The observation was protracted, lasting days. There isn’t anything in the literature of hallucination to explain it. So I have to classify it as an observation of an unknown phenomenon that appeared to be another reality similar to this one and apparently occupying the same space.

I have suspected for years that just such a place might be involved in the close encounter and UFO experiences—not just a distant star or galaxy in our universe but another actual, physical universe that is part of the same creation as ours is and might, thus, be connected with it. It seems possible that, if this other universe exists, that both should be thought of as a single unit, with the two halves functioning together, but in ways that we have not yet detected—or rather, only just begun to detect.

But a companion universe? Really? This would not be part of what is known as the multiverse, which is conceived of as an endlessness of universes outside of our own but not sharing the same space. There have even been a few indications that such universes may exist. In December of 2015, cosmologist Ranga Ram Chary published a paper concerning anomalies in the cosmic background radiation in which he says, “A plausible explanation is the collision of our Universe with an alternate universe.” He also states, however, that “deeper observations are necessary to confirm this unusual hypothesis.” But could there be another universe immediately present, right here, sharing the same space as ours?

There is some very interesting evidence that such a thing might be real and, not only that, a method of testing for its presence has been devised.

If another universe is entwined with ours and it is possible to cross back and forth, it would not only explain a lot about the behavior of some of our visitors and the craft they seem to be using but also reconcile some serious anomalies of physics.

Physics calls such a universe a mirror universe. And even the idea that everything in it would be the opposite of what is present here might be the case, at least to some degree. The landscape didn’t look to me like the exact opposite of this one, but I cannot be sure of that. It was very similar, but I am not so sure that I would have been able to perceive it as a mirror image, even if it is one. Having no experience of such a thing, I also have no idea what it would look like.

When the two universes were created, physics tells us that the mirror must have been cooler than ours, otherwise some of its matter would have leaked across the barrier between the two, and gravity in our universe would be stronger than it is. The greater coolness of the companion universe would mean that it would have lower luminosity—just as did Homer’s Asphodel, and just as I observed at Pine Ridge.

A charming hint that it may at times be possible to cross between them comes from an obscure 12th century source. It is the story of the Green Children of Woolpit. One day around the year 1130, the villagers of Woolpit discovered two children, a brother and a sister, standing beside one of the wolf pits. (These were intended to trap wolves, who abounded in Britain at the time.) The children were green in color, wore strange clothing and spoke an unknown language.

They gradually adapted, lost their green color and learned English. The boy died but the girl survived and said that they came from a land where there was no sunshine and the light was like twilight. The girl was given the name Agnes and married a royal official called Richard Barre.

I’ve been vaguely aware of this story for years, but now the perpetual twilight described in it brought it very much to mind. Did these children come from our companion universe? If so, how? There is no record of them explaining why they happened to end up in the English countryside.

They also said that the sun never shone in their world and thought of it as being underground. But they presumably knew nothing about what might actually be causing the difference in luminosity.

This may just be an old story, completely unrelated, but there are a number of quite compelling reasons, even beyond the lower luminosity observed by me and Homer and reported by Agnes and her brother, that a companion universe might be real.

First, the Big Bang should have left more of the isotope lithium-7 in our universe. According to Alain Coc of the Centre for Nuclear Science and the Science of Matter in France, mirror neutrons coming into our universe from the other would destabilize beryllium-7, the isotope whose decay leads to lithium-7.

If this is happening, it would explain why there is less lithium-7 in our universe than there should be. Additionally, we frequently measure ultra-high-energy cosmic rays coming from outside our galaxy, but they carry more energy than should be possible given the distance they are traveling. Zurab Berezhiani of the University of L’Aquila in Italy has shown that, because of the lower temperature of the mirror universe, they can travel farther without expending as much energy as they would if they remained in our universe across their whole journey. If they do oscillate between universes, that would explain their anomalous energy. In addition, and perhaps most tellingly, the most developed mirror models indicate that there must be five mirror particles for every particle in our universe. This is precisely the same ratio given by our measurements of how much dark matter must exist. It would seem possible, then, that dark matter, which we know must exist but cannot seem to find despite years of trying, might actually be this mirror universe.

So do the visitors come, then, from it? If so, then they seem to have somehow devised or evolved a means of crossing the bar, as it were, between the two.

I am reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Land of Counterpane, where as a boy he “Watched my leaden soldiers go/ With different uniforms and drills/ Among the bedclothes and through the hills…” But I do not think that this real land of counterpane is necessarily so pleasant as he imagines. I think that our visitors are much more like the fairies in William Allingham’s poem “The Fairies” for “Up the airy mountain or down the rushy glen/ We dare not go ahunting/ For fear of little men;/ Wee folk, good folk/ Trooping all together/ Green jacket, red cap/ And white owl’s feather!” We don’t see them any more in the rushy glen, not now that it’s lined with condos. Indeed not, but they do come right into the condos and take us on the same sort of journeys that they always have, leaving us disoriented, confused, and as often as not with a badly deranged sense of time and space. We probably see them also in the night, slipping past overhead in their great, black triangular craft marked by lights at the three angles, generally green, red and white.

Perhaps across all our history, they have been moving between the two universes and, for all I know, coming at the same time out of the distances between the stars in the mirror universe. In that sense, they might be doubly alien, and to make matters even more complex, if creatures with the same morphology exist in our universe and have also mastered interstellar travel, then we might be dealing with alien entities from both universes at the same time, in addition to human beings from the companion universe like the men I encountered in my dream or the people who came out of the night and slipped an implant into my ear without leaving a scar.

Interestingly, if a so-called warp drive that opened a door between interwoven parallel universes could be created, it would involve the use of a highenergy electrical field. Just such a field was present in my garage on the morning after my implant was inserted and is a characteristic of the military implant operations as documented by Helmut and Marion Lammer in their book, MILABS: Military Mind Control and Alien Abductions.

And then there is the matter of metal believed to be from UFO crashes that has been found to have isotopic ratios that cannot be from this universe.

Analysis of such materials was presented by Dr. Jacques Vallee and Dr. Garry Nolan in Paris in June of 2017. Their data showed that some samples taken from material gathered after a UFO apparently exploded over Ubatuba, Brazil on September 13, 1957, displayed isotopic ratios that indicated that it could not have been formed in this universe and only created artificially by the expenditure of unimaginable amounts of energy. The Ubatuba story has been called a hoax, but so have many UFO cases, and now this finding that some of the material is indeed unusual suggests that the case was real. But as Drs. Vallee and Nolan pointed out in their presentation, and Dr. Vallee reiterated in a subsequent presentation held in California in June of 2018, unusual isotopic ratios do not mean that the materials were manufactured by aliens. They only mean what they mean: at present, they are unexplained.

I think that this collection of observations, physics that demands a mirror universe and empirical evidence of material that could have come from it all add up to serious reason to consider that it might actually exist and that at least some of our visitors, and humans with strangely advanced skills, come from it.

What I can offer in conclusion is that I had a lovely and mysterious experience at Pine Ridge, and if the existence of the mirror universe is ever confirmed, then I think that I might have identified at least one origination point for our visitors.

This new phase of my life, which I would describe as a period of intensified seeing, began long before I went to Pine Ridge. I did not know it at the time, but it was on December 7, 2007, at 4:53 in the morning that I began to become aware that life can be lived in an entirely new way, and that there is, emerging from where it has long been hidden along the byways of human experience, a new vision and a new world.

Whitley Strieber Pine Ridge 2019 Mediating

Whitley Strieber Meditating at Pine Ridge, 2019. Photo by Alan Steinfeld

Books by Whitley Strieber

Communion

A New World

Whitley Strieber is the author of Communion and three follow-on books about his close encounter experiences, Transformation, Breakthrough and, in 2019, A New World. His podcast, Dreamland, has been running on his website, Unknowncountry.com, since 1998. He is also the author of The Wolfen, The Hunger and Superstorm, all made into films (Superstorm as the Day After Tomorrow.) His most recent books are Super Natural, written with Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, The Afterlife Revolution and A New World.

9 thoughts on “A New World”

  1. alanborky says:

    A suggestion Whitley. Just as the weakest known force gravity seems to hold everything just sufficiently together to allow things to exist and operate as they seemingly do then perhaps telepathy in the form of internested fields just sufficiently holds together such groups as say humans to enable them to operate as families/cities/nations/civilizations etc. Operating relatively harmoniously at times when such hypothetical fields might be capable of expanding or contracting we might observe murmuration amongst starlings or thee creation of esoteric groups/schools. Or on a larger scale the global embracing of say female suffrage/Newtonian physics/Evolution/quantum theory/emergence of new nations/homosexulaity/the Fall of the Berlin Wall/the end of Apartheid etc etc etc. Relatively inharmonious operation might facilitate such group mindlessness as gang rapes/riots/locust swarms/fascistic political revolutions/wars. If such hypothetical fields were in the process of expaning/contracting to become unstable for some reason we might observe say not just extreme politically polarized hostility but the possibility of civil war.

  2. Bill Reed says:

    Hi Whitney,
    I am curious on how a compass reacts at Pine Ridge?

  3. Shawn Hamilton says:

    I’ve followed Whitley Strieber’s work since at least 1999 when I was teaching high school in California and had “Communion” on my class library shelf. The alien on the cover drew attention to the book and students would read it.

    Based on what I’ve read of Mr. Strieber’s writing, I can see that he is a person living through experiences that our technocratic culture can’t accommodate and won’t acknowledge as valid. I assume he has experienced tremendous pressures trying to adapt.

    Had Mr. Strieber been born in India, or Tibet, or in a North or South American aboriginal society, he would have had a much easier run this life! His experiences would have been respected—certainly not mocked, and possibly revered! He would have benefited greatly from a cultural context that supported his experience.

  4. Whitley Strieber says:

    Interesting question, Bill. I did not have one and did not think about it while I was there. I’ll go back, and when I do, I’ll take one.

    1. Bill Reed says:

      Hi Whitley, Thanks for the reply, I live in Australia and some of my paranormal experiences have been recorded by Brian Gunst your Australian counterpart.

      I treat my personal experiences as private but I would be glad to communicate through Graham’s PM site if you have any questions.

  5. M E Fuller says:

    I was excited about this book because we’re all looking for a new world, right? Something better. Something magnificent. But based on what you wrote about your experience at Pine Ridge, I just can’t. Stop thinking about it. Stop describing and analyzing and concluding. What you experienced there has a name and is much more than you can conjure up words for. I’m not trying to sound smarter than I am, or discredit whatever your work is, but as with anything, it’s only as strong as its weakest link. In this case it is the analysis that weakens – but it will not tear the house down. It just tears us down by breaking everything up into small pieces that obscure the whole. Your new world? It’s the old one. And maybe your book is more than the snippet I read. But now I won’t know.

  6. Jeanne Phillips says:

    Your account is fascinating, and I thank you for sharing. I have had many paranormal type experiences in my life and am comforted by stories such as yours.

  7. Jon Ferber says:

    I am 67 years old now and spent my life searching for the rim or edge of our perceived world(view). As the years have passed, through meditation or just ‘unbending intent’ I have meandered into other worldviews. Sometimes they are like lucid dreams (like some of your experiences). Sometimes they are superimposed on my ‘alpha world’ as I call it. I too sometimes just close my eyes and see other perceptions I can only describe as deep non-ordinary ‘locations’ that my reason cannot explain to its self. One way I have been able to use metaphor to help me move into other overlapping ‘realities’ (worldviews) is to imagine a literal window through which I climb, to find my ‘self’ in an alternate place. Caution is paramount, as you have referred to in your writings. I have been psychically and physically injured a few times doing these exercises. Let the travelers beware.

    I believe we are entering a period in our communal existence which will slowly (and not necessarily safely) bring us into alignment with a fully new communal reality or worldview, as I like to call it. I sense this is what the Mayan calendar referred to with respect to the end of this world. I am finally no longer hesitant to expose my perceptions and ‘perceptual’ experiments to those who can help me understand them. This is in part thanks to your books.

    Thank you.

  8. James McKelvey says:

    Whitley Strieber and Graham Hancock,

    If you ever get down North Carolina way would be happy to give you a “grand afternoon tour” of the sacred Pilot Mountain near Mt. Airy. Have photographed the mountain “faces” since 2012, done three years of almost full time research in local university archives and now in the midst of writing a book. As you both know, I’m sure, easier said then done.

    Maybe the original inspiration for the book came from listening live to Bob Welch sing “Hypnotized” opening for Dave Mason at Pine Knob Music Theater outside Detroit in 1979 when I was writing for weekly Variety in NYC concert reviews and news items as a stringer in Michigan.

    Here is a Fleetwood Mac remaster link below of “Hypnotized” with the Nunne’hi drumming that start the song that could be heard from the bald spots on the mountains of North Carolina back into the ancient of times and if you left a gift beside the field the “little people” would harvest all your corn for you over night:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Oo3brFVJ9A

    All the best to you both!

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