Original subtitles

Some people who are associated with the CIA came to my office

one day, unannounced, and started talking about UFOs.

[man] That's not our L and S, though, is it?

There's another thing.

They said, "We have this medical data."

"We need your help."

Looking at the brain scans,

we found the same internal scarring.

What's special about these people?

Well, they're pilots.

We're seeing them in the morning, afternoon.

We're seeing them in the evening.

In their maneuvers.

They don't correlate with the technology

that I'm aware of as a fighting pilot.

[Mellon] All these different government agencies had

pertinent information on this topic

that they weren't sharing.

There was virtually no discussion

in mainstream news outlets.

Yet, meanwhile, local papers, there were

thousands and thousands of reports all over the world.

After that night, I became scared.

I had a mark on the side of my head.

I had been rectally injured.

I was obviously the victim of an assault of some sort.

But when? Who?

There is a much bigger picture,

a much broader way of looking at UFOs.

It's not as simple as some physical craft

coming from somewhere else.

There's something elusive or trickster-like

about the phenomena themselves.

It might be fair to say we're in a Jacques Vallée moment here.

[interviewer] Keep coming.

-About? -[interviewer] Your history.

Yes. Okay.

For me, Jacques Vallée is the barometer.

He's a major UFO researcher, really legendary in many ways.

I'm not sure it's common knowledge,

but the Monsieur Lacombe character,

played by François Truffaut,

is actually based on Jacques Vallée.

[Kripal] He started out as very much

a kind of nuts and bolts kind of guy.

You know, the UFO was a machine in the sky,

and it was about tracking things with NASA and...

you know, maps and astronomy, et cetera.

He's moved very much to a view that it's also about folklore,

it's about religion, it's about consciousness.

Jacques Vallée is certainly one of the most influential,

one of the most, I think, intellectually nuanced

and innovative thinkers who've been a part

of the UFO world now for a good long time.

The public's awareness of the problem has deepened

in the last five years, certainly.

People are taking it more seriously,

because now it's not just one person

seeing something, it's one person

seeing something supported by technology that we trust.

[man] Hey, dude. They're all going against the wind.

The wind's 120 knots to the west.

So that takes the whole subject to another level.

I was just in Washington a few days ago

because I've been asked to brief some staff people

on the background of the problem.

[reporter] Just last week, the U.S. government revealed

they are tracking more than 650 potential cases

of so-called unidentified aerial phenomena,

more commonly known as UFOs.

Director of the Pentagon's

All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Sean Kirkpatrick.

Of those over 650, we've prioritized

about half of them to be of anomalous, interesting value.

I was informed in the course of my official duties

of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval

and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access

to those additional read-ons when I requested it.

I'd rather not talk about who asked to meet with me.

And there are a number of us, you know,

are providing background data and historical data

so that hopefully some of the mistakes made before

are not repeated.

[announcer] Jacques Vallée, International Authority

on the UFO experience.

First thing I'd like to dispel is

the frequent misconception that UFOs

are limited to this country.

Well, UFOs are not an American phenomenon.

They are a worldwide phenomenon.

[Eghigian] The Ufology community, it has to be said,

is a diverse community.

There's lots of different voices,

lots of different perspectives involved,

lots of UFO sleuths in the early days.

These detectives, these investigators.

But Jacques Vallée was not the first,

probably the first great one

and the one who really makes a huge difference

is this guy, Donald Keyhoe.

A retired military man, a guy who then makes a career

as a pulp fiction writer.

So he's got connections to both of those worlds.

And he is assigned by one of these pulp magazines

to actually conduct a kind of investigative

journalistic reportage about this topic.

The UFO movement as we know it today

really begins just a few years before this, in 1947.

There's a private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold,

who's flying over Washington state,

who sees these nine objects flying in a pattern

at enormous speeds in formation.

And he reports this to the media,

and from that moment on,

you start to see a wave of sightings across America.

Keyhoe talks to some of his sources

in the military and in intelligence,

and he publishes, in 1950,

an article and a book later on called

The Flying Saucers Are Real about this phenomenon.

Is there any tangible evidence that these flying saucers exist?

Well, I'm positive they exist.

The weight of the evidence makes it impossible

to arrive at any other conclusion.

This book is really, really important

for a number of reasons.

First of all, the arguments it makes

that the government is pretty much convinced

that these things are extraterrestrial in origin.

Secondly, they're keeping it a secret

because they're scared it's going to provoke a mass panic.

And third, that the belief is that the aliens are now here

for the first time because they've seen

that we have exploded atomic bombs.

They know we have the secret to atomic energy,

and that concerns them.

The other thing that's really key about Donald Keyhoe

is that chapters of the book get serialized

in newspapers and magazines throughout the world.

So, by the end of 1950, Donald Keyhoe and his arguments

are known virtually across the globe.

I've always wanted to be an astronomer.

You know, when I grew up, I had a telescope.

What teenagers do when they discover science and so on.

And what changed my look at things is that I saw a UFO

with a friend of mine.

We were the two best students in physics and math,

and he saw it independently of me.

This was very clear blue sky in summer in France,

outside Paris.

Very clearly, a disk.

My mother saw it first, called me.

I saw it with her. There was no question.

The next day, this friend told me he had seen

the same thing with binoculars.

I got him to draw it for me, and it was exactly what I had seen.

At the time, there were new aircraft coming up,

you know, the first jets and so on.

Said that could be a new device that's going

to be publicized later.

Except that it didn't.

My first job was at Paris Observatory

tracking the early satellites.

So we were working with the U.S. Navy.

You know, we're computing orbits of satellites.

So this was a new, completely new science

coming up, and it was exciting.

We... I mean, the whole team, saw some things

we could not explain, but we did not report it.

And the lesson there, I asked, why didn't...?

I mean, we had computed the orbit, we had the data

with data from other observatories.

"Why don't we send it to the U.S. Navy?"

And my boss said, "The Americans would laugh at us."

And the last thing you want as a scientist in France

or anywhere else in the world

is to be laughed at by the American academy.

Because the Americans may have an explanation

for this that they haven't given us.

Major Keyhoe. Why? Why will the Air Force,

why will the United States government withhold information

from United States citizens? For what reason?

Because they're treating them like children,

the way they did with the H-bomb at first,

and the way they were doing with...

They've been doing with other things.

Now, I'm not attacking the United States Air Force.

I'm attacking a small group in there

that has been persistently keeping this from the...

from the public, just as they've kept other things.

The conspiracy theory, at least within the UFO world,

is really something that emerges almost

from the very beginning.

Lots of people over the decades are asking, "What are they?"

"Where are they from? What are their intentions?"

But there's this second order question,

which is, "What does the government know?"

"When are they going to come clean?"

And, in fact, Donald Keyhoe really makes that his focus.

He becomes the head of really, America's biggest

UFO organization called NICAP.

NICAP's mission is primarily going to be

what I think we today would call disclosure.

Get the government, lobby the government to come clean.

We want congressional hearings.

[reporter] NICAPs director, Major Donald E. Keyhoe,

insisted that the Air Force knew more than it was telling.

We are being observed by a highly advanced,

superior civilization.

Instead of being a subject for ridicule

and a big joke, actually is a serious matter

which could affect the lives of all of us.

[reporter] And for the umpteenth time in as many years,

the Air Force called before a congressional committee,

said it was hiding nothing.

There's nothing in the records

that could indicate that we have been visited

by any advanced civilization.

Going back from the 1950s,

people love the government secrecy movies.

But it's often called science fiction for a reason.

We live in a country where conspiracy theories

now are all the rage, right?

We have political leaders that traffic conspiracy theories

in a way that we didn't a generation ago.

[Bender] I find it hard to believe,

having spent so many years with these agencies

and the people who work there,

mostly good people, mostly dedicated public servants,

that they have orchestrated this vast galactic conspiracy

for decades and decades.

But people love a good story.

And the more fantastical it is, the better.

[man] The committee wishes to emphasize that there is

no evidence of any wider conspiracy.

No evidence whatsoever.

[Bender] No matter what the answers are,

it's potentially one of the biggest news stories,

if not the biggest news story in the history of mankind.

So, obviously, it would be huge if we know, you know,

without a doubt that we're not alone.

If the Chinese or the Russians have developed

some futuristic technology and we don't know about it,

it is the biggest intelligence failure in history.

And they had them in 2004,

flying circles around the USS Nimitz off California.

That's two decades ago. So what do they have now?

If it's our secret technology

and Congress doesn't know about it,

that's a scandal.

So, you know, wherever you might come down on the explanations

for the unidentified aerial phenomena,

as they call them, UAP,

whatever it is, it's a huge story.

And if you're in the news business,

why would you not want to cover that?

On the basis of what I had seen was

at Paris Observatory,

there was no question then for me

that those phenomena were real.

As a French citizen, I had access

to the early French files, which were kept by the military.

I had access to big computers, so I started building databases,

building my own files, more or less privately,

with interested colleagues

who were not afraid of the stigma attached to it,

which was real.

You know, somebody told me, "You're not going to have"

"a career as an astronomer in France"

"if you continue doing this."

But I didn't care because I had the data.

I would talk to somebody who reported something

to the police, the farmer or the rancher or whatever.

But I would ask around, "Are there other people"

"who've had something like that around?"

"Well, there's a farm, you know,"

"a few miles down the road where the same thing happened,"

"but they never reported it."

I would go to the farm and I would talk to the farmer.

Most of the time, they would be shocked,

and I would laugh and I would say,

"Well, you know, I talked to your neighbors,"

"and I'm really interested in what you saw."

One of them described something that happened

not to him, but to his father.

This was 1932. Okay?

It wasn't 1947 or 1957.

[Gallaudet] I have a great deal of respect for Jacques,

and what I admire about him is

he is ultra objective.

He listens to the eyewitnesses,

and he just accepts what they report

and documents it and the diversity

of these encounters.

He has been working on the topic, I think,

longer than I've been alive.

So you have to...

You have to respect that, at least.

I was recruited to join the University of Texas

Astronomy Department to work on galaxies and planets

and computing, and then I was told,

"If you want to continue looking into," you know,

"the UFO issue," you know, "use the equipment"

"on your own time,"

"as long as you do the work for the department."

I rebuilt the files with the help of my wife,

and we ended up with something like

10,000 cases on the computer.

[Eghigian] By the 1960s, here in the United States,

scientists, academics, people like that

are now looking into this matter.

Probably the big advocate

is the consultant J. Allen Hynek.

Hynek was an astronomer, and from the very earliest days

of the flying saucer phenomenon in the '40s,

he was brought in as a consultant to the Air Force

to help them in analyzing

these reports that were coming in.

Dr. Hynek had always been in communication

with the people in Austin, in Texas.

So he heard of my database and said,

"If you want to come to Northwestern in Chicago,"

"I'll give you access to the U.S. files."

So I told Hynek, "I'll bring the European files"

"and you let me look at the American files"

"and we'll merge it together and we'll try to do"

"some high-level statistics."

So we started working together on that.

It's very clear that, at least privately,

Hynek becomes ever more convinced that there's something

that just can't be explained away

in these sort of conventional ways.

I started almost as a complete skeptic,

because I thought the whole thing was

a question of postwar nerves,

but it was the persistence of the phenomenon...

it refused to dry up and blow away...

that finally led me to the belief

that we had a real phenomenon to deal with.

[Vallée] The computer work first was designed

to clean the data, finding the patterns

that are natural, physical patterns,

to narrow the database to the cases

that were the most intriguing,

and then to look at their distribution in space and time.

What emerged were situations where there was a lot of reports

in a particular part of the world that peaked

in about a month or two and then declined.

So you had essentially three months of a wave

of cases that were not explained by sociology.

So we could begin to look at the patterns of these waves.

1950, 1952, 1954, 1956.

It breaks down in 1957.

What is 1957? Sputnik.

Today, a new moon is in the sky.

A 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.

[announcer] The Soviet satellite triumph was demonstrated

for all to see.

All around the world we listened.

So you can say, "Well, there were more people"

"looking up in 1957" because they were looking for Sputnik.

[Bender] I think there's plenty of evidence.

During the Cold War, the government fanned

the flames of UFO hysteria on purpose,

because if we were building secret planes

and testing them out in the Nevada desert,

we didn't want the Russians looking at them.

So if you start spreading UFO hysteria,

people are looking here, people are looking there,

including the Russians and the Soviets too,

to throw them off.

The stuff we're sort of hiding, We don't want them to look at.

[Kean] Project Blue Book was an Air Force project.

They were the leading agency in the '50s and '60s

involved with everything that was going on

with the UFOs and with the investigations that went on.

If they have retrieved material and craft

and bodies or anything like that,

if they retrieved these things during the Cold War,

they certainly are not going to want to reveal that

to the Russians or anyone else in the outside world.

[Vallée] They were reporting to Congress every year

that they could explain

everything except maybe 2% of the...

Which meant it's not worth spending money on it,

which was a big mistake

because the 2% could be the 2% that really mattered.

But that's scientists speaking.

You know, certainly from the military point of view,

2% wasn't worth deploying officers and airplanes

and everything else.

So Project Blue Book funded a small project

suggested by Dr. Hynek for me to redo the Air Force files.

So I was invited, with Dr. Hynek,

to the Foreign Technology Division,

and that's a visit I'm not going to forget.

They had a little building with no windows,

about 200 PhDs, who were doing intelligence

on primarily Russian equipment.

And you go into the lobby and you notice an airplane hanging

from the ceiling and when you look carefully you realize

it's a MiG with the hammer and sickle on the tail.

Okay, so that gave you an idea of what was going on

in the building.

They were not interested in UFOs.

Hal interview, take one. Mark.

I'm Hal Puthoff, PhD in quantum electronics

from Stanford University.

And I've been part of programs for corporate America

for various government organizations,

intelligence community, DoD and so on.

In general, in the academic community,

things like UFO research or stigmatized tinfoil hat

kind of stuff.

But behind the scenes, the Department of Defense

and the intelligence community, they don't have that luxury.

If there's something that's real that could potentially affect

national security, then they're all over it.

Starting back in the '50s,

the government felt they had to begin to gather data on this.

One of the issues that's difficult to deal with

is the fact that sightings are so ubiquitous.

I mean, hundreds of sightings every year.

The problem for the military,

it was a public relations problem.

They didn't have a budget to investigate all the cases.

This was a real albatross around the neck of the Air Force.

They hated dealing with this subject.

So they really wanted to get out of it.

And so they asked that the University of Colorado,

under Edward Condon, would take a look at this.

A scientific study that gets conducted starting in 1966,

and really gets done by 1968, gets a lot of public attention.

[Vallée] Dr. Hynek and I were the first two scientists called

as witnesses to testify before the committee.

[Eghigian] That investigative task force gets riddled

by questions about whether or not

he and others are acting in good faith in studying it.

When they conclude that this phenomenon

not only has no legs, but that it's certainly

not worthy of any kind of scientific funding.

Truth of the matter is, they really wanted to get out of it.

And so, in 1969, it was decided that the Condon report,

even though there's a lot of good data,

even in their own report,

that they couldn't account for, they said,

"Okay, but we're not learning any science here,"

"so let's just abandon this."

There was an explosion inside the committee

when they discovered a memo one of the administrators

had written, saying, "We need to get rid of this whole problem."

We have not been hiding anything.

The investigations have been made public.

The very memo by General Bolander

that canceled Project Blue Book

had down in the fine print, "Aha."

But if there's anything that looks like

it might affect national security,

we will continue to gather data on that.

So the truth of the matter is that the program didn't die.

It just went black.

The Air Force has been, yeah, very noticeably silent

on this issue, and the Navy has taken the lead

in terms of speaking about it, acknowledging the videos,

contributing to reports.

Of course, the Air Force was responsible

for a lot of the things that happened

in the past that people are unhappy about.

[man] The committee concluded

that in the 19 years since the first UFO was sighted,

there has been no evidence that unidentified flying objects

are a threat to our national security.

As we convene here, UAP are in our airspace,

but they are grossly underreported.

These sightings are not rare or isolated. They are routine.

Parts of our government are aware more

about UAP than they let on.

But excessive classification practices

keep crucial information hidden.

[Gallaudet] I served in the Navy for 32 years.

It's weird, but there are cultures

within each military branch, and the Navy culture

is very much one, because we work on ships,

away from any kind of support

or any kind of observation sometimes

that we just learn how to do things on our own,

and we take initiative,

and we're not afraid to speak out

because we sort of own the issue.

But the Air Force always has some oversight,

and that oversight creates

a much more hierarchical organization.

And you see that in UAP reporting.

These pilots, these Navy pilots, are not afraid to come out.

But the Air Force,

their reporting is next to nothing.

[Mellon] Navy and Air Force jets are both training

and doing exercises in the same area.

The Navy pilots are seeing and reporting these UAP.

None of the Air Force pilots are reporting these things.

And it's not because they weren't seeing them.

They had to have been seeing them.

They have even better sensors than the F-18s.

[Gallaudet] UAP are not going to be discriminating

between any given military branch

or any given country, obviously.

The Air Force has to be seeing these.

Of course, the Air Force has a lot more to lose

than the Navy, because they own this multi-billion dollar

air defense system, so they'd be acknowledging that they're

failing to meet their mission.

[Vallée] The problem for people like me, who've been studying it

for a long time, what the military sees

with their devices is only maybe 10% of the cases.

I worked on a classified database, as you know,

that had 260,000 cases from all over the world.

Those are not being considered right now.

I cannot really talk about what we actually did,

but there is no reason why that should remain classified.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

No. Didn't know who he was.

I'd been starting to read in the area

and, you know, mostly watching YouTube

and going down some pretty weird rabbit holes.

Jacques reached out to me about two or three weeks later,

and so we went for lunch, and he said,

"Well, what do you think about what the aliens might be?"

And so I gave him my answer.

He completely destroyed me.

I was infuriated.

And then I realized I like this guy,

because he just deconstructed my argument.

That it's future humans. It was just speculation.

Future humans have come back to mess with us or watch us.

You know, he didn't prove me wrong.

He proved to me that my certainty

of the conclusion was misplaced,

and we just became friends

and I saw him from that point on,

almost literally every other week.

[Vallée] Obviously his work in biology and medicine

is exceptional,

but I admire his willingness to jump into this

and to look at the accumulated data.

So we started working together.

When it comes to UAP or UFOs,

there's a story and then there's material evidence.

[Vallée] I'm very grateful for people like Dr. Nolan

to bring leadership and to bring real science into it,

because it's going to be needed.

Scientists are beginning to realize that,

"Well, there appears to be more to this than we thought."

We have such excellent sensor systems

that have been developed.

So now you've got the pilots in the air taking pictures

with their forward-looking infrared radar system.

You've got overhead planes

that are getting information on the flight path of it.

You've got other ships at sea catching these things, you know,

dropping from 80,000 feet down to the water

in hardly any time at all.

That's on the detection of the events.

Mr. Fravor, the Tic Tac incident

that you were engaged occurred in 2004.

What kind of reporting took place after that incident?

None. We had a standard debrief where the backseaters went down

to our carrier intel center and briefed what had happened.

And that was it. No one else talked to us.

And I was in the top 20 in the battle group.

No one came.

The captain was aware. The admiral was aware.

Nothing was done.

[Vallée] I think the people

who are going to testify before Congress

are all from the defense intelligence agencies.

And, yes, we trust them because they have access

to very, very good information.

But what they look at is very narrow.

What about what people in France have seen

in the fields since the 1940s?

What about in other countries?

What about what Whitley Strieber saw?

Of course, I guess the Strieber story is pretty well-known.

What happened to you initially?

I first met Whitley over a dozen years ago.

We were both at a retreat center.

Whitley was standing on a patio overlooking the ocean.

And I stepped out onto the patio to introduce myself.

And I said his name. He almost jumped out of his skin.

And I thought to myself,

"This is a man suffering from PTSD."

[Kean] He's been writing about this topic for decades.

There's nobody else like Whitley Strieber.

[man] Whitley Strieber is a novelist, a memoirist.

[Kean] His best-selling book, Communion,

just changed the world, changed ev...

I mean, in terms of experiences,

people who had encounters with phenomenon

on many, many different levels.

[Eghigian] Strieber brings a couple of different things

to the table.

One is he's an experienced writer.

He's a horror writer.

He's a very famous one, and very good at that.

So here we have somebody who has an experience,

who can actually talk about it himself,

write about it himself.

Most experiencers don't do that.

They have other people write their narratives for them.

I'm Whitley Strieber.

I grew up in south Texas. Old-fashioned Texas family.

From early times,

I was very interested in writing.

I wrote my first short story when I was six,

and it wasn't much of a short story,

but my mother loved it.

And when I left high school, I was going to become a writer.

That was the only thing I wanted to do.

And then I met Anne in April of 1969,

and everything began to change.

She was in New York trying to become a fashion designer.

So here were these two crazy dreamers,

a fashion designer and a writer, right?

We had been doing very well with the writing,

and we had a little money in... I guess it was '84.

And we realized we could have a place outside of the city.

We found this little cabin way out in the middle of nowhere.

Since I was a full-time writer, we could actually live there

all summer when our little boy wasn't in school.

So we bought it. That's how it started.

And we certainly didn't expect

anything peculiar to happen there.

The Christmas was exceptionally lovely.

Our little boy was at the perfect Christmas age.

There was absolutely nothing that night

that would have suggested anything strange

to happen the next morning.

This was witnessed by two friends,

Annie Gottlieb and Jacques Sandalescu.

They were in the cabin.

Downstairs. And our son was in the next bedroom downstairs.

And we were in the master bedroom upstairs.

And in the middle of the night, I was awakened by light.

A lot of light woke me up right away.

And it was cold, and the wood stove had been on.

And I thought, "Oh, my God. The stove set the roof on fire."

So I jumped out of bed, and at the same time,

there was a huge bang that came from outside,

and the light went away.

Then our little boy was awakened by the bang

and started screaming.

And so I ran down, and the door

to Jacques and Annie's bedroom was open.

And Annie was standing in the doorway, as I recall.

And I said, "It's all right. It was nothing."

And I went and comforted my son and then went back to bed.

But later, when Annie and Jacques

were questioned without any preamble,

they remembered a lot that was unusual.

Jacques had seen a light so bright,

he thought it was daylight, and he thought he'd overslept.

Annie had heard feet scurrying from above,

from the ceiling, as if someone was running...

Little feet were running out of the bedroom.

We weren't aware of any of that the night it happened.

But after that night, I became scared.

I bought a shotgun. I bought a pistol.

I could not imagine sleeping another second at the cabin.

And Anne thought I was going crazy.

After the experience in December,

I was really strung out.

I hurt. I had been assaulted, and that was obvious to me.

I mean, I had a mark on the side of my head.

I had been rectally injured.

I was obviously the victim of an assault of some sort.

But when? Who?

Yes.

I went to the doctor because my first thought

was either it's a brain tumor or psychosis of some kind.

Because the memories were very vivid.

I went through an MRI scan to determine whether or not

the brain was in normal shape, and it was.

The test which showed that I was

an exceptionally stable brain, highly unlikely to hallucinate.

What I wanted to do was to find out

that there was some explanation for this that was normal.

A rational, rational explanation.

I think on the second doctor visit, he examined me rectally

because I mentioned that I was in pain.

And he did find I had been raped.

And, uh...I was in...

It was a terrible period of turmoil in our lives

because I was subliminally thinking I was going mad.

Yeah.

No. I thought, "I can't tell Anne this."

And I started trying to get rid of Anne

and get her to divorce me because I figured I'm psychotic

and I don't know what is going on.

Finally, I got it together enough,

and I told her one night.

She was...

Tears were coming at the edges of her eyes because she was

thinking I was going to say, "Honey, we need to end this."

"It's not working."

And instead I say, "I think I was taken aboard

a flying saucer by little men."

And she blurts out, "Oh, my God!"

"Thank God. I thought you were going crazy."

We burst out laughing and sort of laughing and crying

at the same time. We just flew into each other's arms.

And that's when the whole rest of our life started.

After I had the two sessions with the head

of the New York State Department of Psychiatry

and one of the... Literally

the leading psychiatrists in the United States...

We had to face the fact that...

Apparently something

had happened that involved these strange beings,

that they were real in some way.

As to what they were, I've never been ready

to say they're aliens from another planet.

A lot of other people have said that for me,

but that's not what I say.

I call them "visitors" because we don't know what they are.

We have no idea.

My wife, I have to give her credit,

she was always encouraging me to write. She was the one...

who made sure that Communion, the book, was a book,

essentially, of questions, not of answers.

And millions of people responded to it.

They knew it.

They recognized it from something in their own lives.

When I was a boy, you know,

I think I was around seven or eight,

I woke up with little people in my room,

you know, and I told my parents, I said,

"There's these little men who come into my room at night,"

"And I'm awake and I can't move."

And, "Oh, you're dreaming. It's okay."

And I, "No, and one of them looks in the window."

You know, and then that happened for about two...

My... I'm getting goosebumps remembering it.

And then it stopped.

I don't have any bad memories of it.

I just remember it.

I didn't know what a UFO was then.

There was no Internet.

Aliens weren't a discussion topic.

There were three channels on our TV, black and white.

But it wasn't literally until I was a grad student

at Stanford and I was at a used bookstore

in the science fiction section, of course.

And I pull out a book,

and there on the cover was the face of what I had seen.

And it was Whitley Striber's Communion.

I remember dropping the book on the ground and had

like a nervous breakdown, because it was like that was...

That was... And it all came flooding back.

[Strieber] I wanted it to be a film,

and somehow it ended up kind of cockeyed.

I think it would have been possible

for the film to reflect the open-endedness

and questioning of the book,

but it does freeze things in a kind of level of reality.

Christopher Walken danced in the film.

He's a wonderful, great actor

and also a great song and dance man.

And he dances great, but people keep asking me,

"Well, did you really dance?"

And I said, "Of course I didn't dance."

This experience... compels us

to keep the question open at every level.

And in so far as the film tended to close the question

a little bit, that wasn't good.

How would you react, do you think, if you woke up

in the middle of the night and found

at the end of your bed a small figure

with two holes for eyes, a hole for mouth,

and wearing a very strange metallic garment?

You know, I learned something about people,

a lot about people, when I published Communion.

Well, you'd probably scream, wake up

and realize that you've been having a nightmare.

Not my next guest, he didn't scream.

He went along with the whole thing, and he ended up

in a spaceship being probed and prodded in all sorts of places.

Seriously, when he woke up in his own bed

the following morning, he had a pain in his bottom,

among other things, and a lot on his mind.

What did he do?

He wrote a book about the whole thing called Communion.

Publishing something with quote, unquote, "claims."

And there weren't claims. They were questions,

but they were taken as claims, is going to make you vulnerable.

Will you welcome, please, Whitley Strieber?

With an introduction like that,

I wasn't sure that I dared to come out.

But here I am, anyway.

A lot of people have a bully hidden in them,

and they want so badly to let that bully out.

I dreamt that I was lying in my bed in the dark,

when all of a sudden this bright blue light

filled the room.

Then I was lying on a table,

and these scary aliens wanted to operate on me.

Then South Park came out,

and their first episode was a lampoon of me.

Dude, visitor. Totally.

Did they give you an anal probe?

Ah, what's an anal probe?

That's when they put this big metal

of hoopaju up your butt.

Whoa, aliens stuck stuff up your ass?

- No. - I became the rectal probe man

and found myself being laughed at

for having been raped.

Sorry to hear about your ass.

Why are you walking so funny, Cartman?

-Shut up. -You know,

I'd go on a TV show and they'd ask me about,

"Well, what do you think about the planets?"

"What about Uranus?"

Are you an alien?

-To you, I am, yes. -Are you going to probe us?

Why does everyone always assume that? What am I doing?

Am I harvesting farts?

How much can I learn from an ass?

Well, I...

Moronic, low-grade, creepy ugliness.

What happened? Did little green men come down and...?

No, not at all.

How do you know you're not nuts?

I am talking to you about a real thing.

I'm pretty sure.

The public reaction for a long time

was much more open-minded and friendly.

In fact, the book came out in October '87,

and the letters started like a week later.

I was going around touring for the book,

and Ann called and said, "Whitley, we've got a problem."

"We've got a lot of mail."

[Horowitz]The book became an enormous bestseller.

It captured the experience of countless numbers of people,

many of whom, well into the thousands, wrote letters

to Whitley and his wife Anne, describing related experiences.

[Strieber] The post office was bringing huge boxes

of mail up to the house.

I said, "Annie, what are we going to do?"

"We can't even... We got to get rid of these letters."

She says, "Whitley, we're not getting rid of these letters."

"We're gonna read them."

[Horowitz] This population of people who felt unseen

and lacking in any kind of a voice or recognition

read Communion, felt less alone and said,

"This captures something like my experience."

And people might think, well, these letters

are fan letters, but they really are not fan letters.

They are... "Let me tell you what happened to me" letters.

At length.

They're coming to him to tell them their story.

My name is Jeff Kripal.

I'm a professor of religion, and I'm associate

dean of the School of Humanities

at Rice University.

Another collection here.

It's the Anne and Whitley Strieber collection.

Whitley's been a colleague and a co-writer

of mine for over a decade.

And when Jacques Vallée offered to donate his papers

and correspondence files, I immediately approached Whitley

and said, "Hey, Jacques just did this."

"What do you think?" Basically, "What do you have?"

This is the first Anne and Whitley Strieber collection box.

I don't know, there might be nine of these or so.

And I mean I'm this far in box one.

Whitley published Communion in 1987.

And he made the mistake of putting his address

in the book because he thought,

you know, a dozen people might want to write him.

And they received, they think about a quarter

of a million letters.

And it was Anne actually who took it upon herself

to read through these

and winnow them down to the 5,000 that now exist.

You're talking about 5,000 human lives

that are reaching out to an author to often reveal

their stories they've never told anyone.

A lot of the letters look like...

They look like this.

I mean, they're literally handwritten with, you know,

blue ink on paper that's been torn out of a notebook.

I mean, they're super personal.

The letter writers consistently say,

"Please, please call me, please, please write back."

They recognized in Whitley's honesty and his transparency,

their own anomalous experience

which often they hadn't told anyone.

It's dizzying to fathom

that there are more than 10,000 of these letters.

When you dive in there, you can be delirious.

The details, the specificity, the variety

of experiences of entities witnessed and observed.

So it's going to take a deeper study

of those letters to really see what they might be seen to...

embody or testify to collectively.

[Strieber] What the letters say about us and our world

is really simple.

We don't know what we are.

We are much more, much more than we let ourselves believe.

We live going down a little road of life,

but we live in a magical and extremely strange world

that we are part of and choose not to recognize.

Because if we recognized it, it would be impossible

to live out a normal life.

You would be... God knows what would happen to you.

My own feeling about paranormal phenomena in general

is that they tend to occur in a person's life

when there's some kind of transition or trauma

or danger or illness or death.

What the flip is, is when an intellectual

or a scientist experiences

something in their life that's unexplainable, but it's real.

The flip is when a scientist realizes that,

"Oops, actually, mind is fundamental"

"and matter is what's epiphenomenal."

"Matter is actually some kind of expression"

"of mind or consciousness."

"But my science or my chemistry or my physics actually"

"doesn't change at all."

It's just this complete flip of orientation.

In other words, mind or consciousness is real.

Whatever it is, it's part of being human

and part of our world that, for whatever reason,

we are very reticent to face head-on.