From: rcj@u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson) Newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors Subject: Re: Strieber on Larry King this Monday night Message-ID: <21llts$f7v@news.u.washington.edu> Date: 10 Jul 93 06:00:28 GMT References: Organization: University of Washington It already happened last year (March 11, 1992)... KING: ... Whitley Strieber is back. He's written a string of bestsellers. This one, the latest, is not about people from outer space, but it's going to make some people in the Catholic Church angry. Whitley Strieber is next. Don't go away. ANNOUNCER: Coming up: He wrote volumes about his apparent abduction by aliens. Now, what's happened to Whitley Strieber? [Commercial break] Whitley Strieber Writes About 'Unholy Fire' KING: Whitley Strieber - He scored a sensation in the late 80's with a string of unnerving bestsellers about his apparent UFO experiences. In Communion and its sequel, Strieber described years of perceived abductions by mysterious creatures. Three books, a movie later, Strieber is moving on. His latest novel - Unholy Fire - will likely divide the Catholic community as surely as the Communion book split UFO buffs. Unholy Fire is just out from Dutton - there you see its cover - and Whitley Strieber joins us here in Washington. I like the moustache, Whitley. WHITLEY STRIEBER, Author, 'Unholy Fire': [laughs] Thanks, Larry. KING: Is this a new Whitley Strieber? Mr. STRIEBER: Well, it was an attempt to disguise myself. I think after this is over I'm going to shave it off. KING: [laughs] No alien visits in a long time, Whitley? You know, we have some fun with this. None? Mr. STRIEBER: We had some fun with this, Larry. I still remember- KING: In fact, one night we had a night where I lost control there. Mr. STRIEBER: [laughs] That's right, the moment you lost control still is vivid in my memory. KING: That's right. And what happened, folks, Whitley was on. We got him to talking about aliens, and I just lost it, and it was like Rickles was here. I was on the floor. It was hysterical. Mr. STRIEBER: It was wonderful. KING: And you were a great sport. Mr. STRIEBER: [laughs] Well, I survived it. KING: You haven't been visited in a while? Mr. STRIEBER: Well, you know, I don't know what that was. I never knew what it was. I didn't know then and I don't know now. And I managed to make everyone who's connected with it furious at me because I wouldn't- KING: You wouldn't say it was this; you wouldn't say it was- Mr. STRIEBER: Exactly. I wouldn't say what any of them wanted. KING: Well, you were basically a journalist, right? Mr. STRIEBER: Well, no, I was a novelist really- KING: You were a writer. Mr. STRIEBER: -not even that far up the ladder of fact-getting. I was a writer. KING: You were a writer. Mr. STRIEBER: Novelist, yes. KING: This is something that happened to you. Mr. STRIEBER: Right. KING: So now all you're doing now is just going on and writing? Mr. STRIEBER: Right. It stopped after about three years and there were no physical side effects, no apparent mental side effects - [laughs] - as far as I know. KING: When you go to bed at night, though, do you wonder, 'Could tonight be a return?' Mr. STRIEBER: I have sleep problems. I have been waking up at the approximate hour it happened - about 3:00 in the morning - ever since. KING: All right. What's Unholy Fire about? Mr. STRIEBER: Well, now this is very close to my heart because I've finally gotten up the nerve to write a novel - it has to be a novel - a book about the Church. I am a Catholic. I've been a Catholic since I was born, and I'm awful unhappy with the Church and I think there are some tremendously important things about the Church that we are in danger of losing if the Church collapses, and I think it might collapse. KING: And it'll collapse why? Mr. STRIEBER: Well, basically because there aren't enough people becoming priests. And they're not doing that for one simple reason. Everybody thinks that the Vatican Council was what caused all the turmoil in the Church for the past 25 years, but that was not it. In 1968 the Pope promoted an encyclical, called On Human Life, that said birth control was wrong, and generally what it did was it went into the bedrooms of Catholics all over the world and said, 'You do this. You do that.' And the Church changed. It became, instead of a sacramental church, a church of sex instructions. KING: It wasn't that before? Mr. STRIEBER: Not really. It wasn't emphasized like that. From that moment, that is when people began to resign from the priesthood and when the number of people going into the priesthood began to decline. Church attendance all over the world began to drop and it's never really stopped. It's going up a little bit now, but not much. KING: What's the story line? Mr. STRIEBER: Two priests- One of them is a good priest. He's the kind of priest that every Catholic wishes he knew and that some of them- Like I was lucky enough to grow up with such a priest. And then there's a bad priest. Now, I think that it'll be quite a while into the thing before anyone realizes who's who so I'm going to just let that much out of it, but that's essentially what it's about. And the issue is celibacy and sexuality. I go right into all of that stuff. KING: Andrew Greeley has written lots on this. Mr. STRIEBER: Uh-huh. KING: Have you read him? Mr. STRIEBER: Yes, but he's very polite because he's a priest, himself, and he's got a constituency inside the Church. He can only go so far. I'm free. [laughs] I don't have anybody to stop me. I said what I thought. KING: Why do you stay in the Church if you don't like its tenets? Mr. STRIEBER: Because the sacraments to me are real, and that's what the Church is about. The rest of it - the business about, 'You should think this; you should think that' - I just don't even listen to it. I don't think many people do. KING: You don't? You don't feel, then, if you go and take communion - no pun intended - that you're insincere? Mr. STRIEBER: I think that- I believe in birth control. I do not believe that abortion should be outlawed. In fact, almost down the line I'm the opposite of what the Catholic hierarchy says I should believe. KING: Priests should marry? Mr. STRIEBER: I think priests should marry. I think women should be priests. KING: You're a liberal Catholic. Mr. STRIEBER: An open-minded Catholic. KING: Open-minded Catholic. Mr. STRIEBER: [laughs] Yes. KING: Well, many are saying, 'Why not leave the Church?' Mr. STRIEBER: Because the sacraments are still there and they've remained unchanged for thousands of years, and I want that. I'm going for that. KING: Do you think it's possible to change that most rigid of churches? Mr. STRIEBER: Yes. KING: Do you see another Pope John XXIII around? Mr. STRIEBER: Not right now. KING: It's going to take someone like that, isn't it? Mr. STRIEBER: But it's going to have to happen because they can't- This generation, the Church is going to survive, for the next 20 or so years. But after that, it's going to begin to really profoundly decline because there are just not going to be enough priests. KING: You accept, though, virgin birth- Mr. STRIEBER: I don't know. I think I probably do. KING: You accept the Devil? Mr. STRIEBER: Yes. After what happened to me - the Communion experiences - I decided that that might be a good idea, to accept the idea of the Devil, just in case that's what I saw. [laughs] I'm not certain, but I do simply because if you look closely at the life of the world you see the workings of evil in the world. There seems to be a sort of machinery behind it that is far beyond just the accident of human life and I think there might be a consciousness of some kind there. KING: Do you accept original sin? Mr. STRIEBER: I don't know. KING: Well, you're a practicing Catholic - then why? If you don't know about virgin birth, you don't know about original sin, you like the sacraments- Mr. STRIEBER: Well- KING: You can get the sacraments in the Episcopal Church, can't you? Mr. STRIEBER: Not the same sacraments, no. You can't because in the Catholic Church the belief in communion is very, very deep and very strong - in the Catholic Church - the belief that communion is actually a real interaction between you and the deity. And in the Episcopal Church it's more of a symbolic thing. KING: Now Judaism allows all thoughts. In fact, it has divisions. Mr. STRIEBER: Yes. KING: It has the Reform, the Orthodox, the Conservative - and, as Alan King says, it has a fourth called 'Come As You Are.' Mr. STRIEBER: [laughs] Right. KING: The Catholic Church has- It had divisions when Luther left it. Mr. STRIEBER: Right. Well, right now what the Catholic Church has is three groups. It has the hierarchy with a very old-fashioned view of things that dates almost from the seventeenth century. It has the laity who are, many of them - at least from the studies I have read - are very similar to me in their beliefs. And then it has the working priest, who is trying to do a balancing act between these two groups, to keep his parish alive and also to keep his bishop happy - often very difficult. KING: Do you believe in possession? Mr. STRIEBER: I think that some extremely bizarre things can happen to people along those lines, and I don't think we understand what they are. KING: And that was based on personal experience, right? Mr. STRIEBER: Yes, sure was. KING: Because you were possessed, in a sense. Mr. STRIEBER: I would say I was assaulted by something from the unknown, rather than possessed by it. I hope that I was never possessed by it, although there are those who might disagree with me. [laughs] KING: Whitley Strieber is our guest - nothing but bestsellers. The newest, from Dutton, is Unholy Fire. We'll come back and start to take your phone calls. This is Larry King Live in Washington. Don't go away. [Commercial break] KING: Let's go to your calls for Whitley Strieber. His newest book is Unholy Fire. He's the author of Communion and Transformation. We go to Gary, Indiana. Hello. 8th CALLER: [Gary, Indiana] Hi. It's a great show tonight and I'm privileged to talk to you. I'd like to know whether you thought the movie Communion was an accurate representation of both the book and your experiences, and if you've had a chance to read a book by how- KING: OK, I didn't get that- Mr. STRIEBER: Yes, the movie Communion. I heard that part of it. The movie Communion is a movie of my experiences with the apparent aliens - whatever happened to me. I think, first of all, the movie is emotionally very authentic. It looks like how it felt to have that experience. KING: Who played you? Mr. STRIEBER: Chris Walken [sp?]. KING: Great actor. Mr. STRIEBER: Oh, a wonderful actor, and the director, Philippe Moreau [sp?], got a wonderful job out of him. They did not have enough money to do the things I saw right. It just isn't true to life. KING: You mean, the special effects? Mr. STRIEBER: The special effects, yes, but the emotional- If you want the emotional content of that experience, that movie is really accurate. KING: I think it's Manasquan, New Jersey. Hello. 9th CALLER: [Manasquan, New Jersey] Hello. Mr. Strieber, I had a question. First, I wanted to thank you very much for coming forward with both of your books. Mr. STRIEBER: Oh, thanks. 9th CALLER: They've given me a lot of courage to confront my own situations which were very similar to yours. In fact, I had experiences in a town just outside Pine Bush, New York- Mr. STRIEBER: What's your question? KING: Ah-ha! Whitley, you've got me down. Go ahead. What's your question? 9th CALLER: Yes, I wanted to find out has he had any more situations happen to him since? KING: No. You have not, right? Mr. STRIEBER: OK, well, about a year ago it stopped very abruptly and I may- I don't think I'll ever write about it again, but I will say, just to this caller and to everyone, that I've had since I wrote Communion over 55,000 letters from people around the world who've had similar things they think they had happen to them. And we still get about 200 a week, and this is years after the book has been- KING: And you still don't know what it was, right? Mr. STRIEBER: Nobody knows. KING: You guess outer space. Mr. STRIEBER: I guessed a lot of things. I think the experience over the years became so sublime, my basic problem is I don't even know how to talk about it any more. KING: Did you ever drive around, like by yourself, and say, 'Maybe I'm whacked'? Mr. STRIEBER: At first, yes, but then it became- It turned into something that was the most intellectually challenging and beautiful thing I ever knew and I don't think it was something out of craziness. If it came out of my mind, it came out of a part of my mind that is universal to us all - let me put it that way - and is really something wonderful. KING: Sunnyvale, California, with Whitley Strieber. Hello. 10th CALLER: [Sunnyvale, California] Hi, Larry. Hi, Whitley. I want to ask you what is your thoughts on the patterns that are being found in corn fields and of cows being operated on- Mr. STRIEBER: Circles, OK - crop circles. All right, we're not going to talk about the Church, it looks like, tonight but- KING: It's hard to get away from, Whitley. Mr. STRIEBER: [laughs] It's hard to get away from this, but OK. First of all, crop circles - very interesting what's going on in England with these circles. There's been a lot of talk that it was a hoax by a couple of guys walking around with boards on their feet, but in a little magazine, a weekly magazine called Science News, recently there was a fascinating article saying that previously unknown geometric patterns have been discovered in these circles, indicating new theorems of geometry that are beyond anything that we have yet discovered. And there was a wonderfully lively sort of debate in the letters column this week about that among a group of scientists so- KING: What do you think? Mr. STRIEBER: Well, again, I think it's related to what was happening to me and what's happening to a lot of people. I think something's changing around here and we just can't even begin to put it into words. I used to have a newsletter which I ran for a couple of years to help satisfy people's curiosity and I said in the last newsletter, 'It's us.' It's something to do with us. It has to be - the depth of it and the subtlety of it and the profoundly human and yet sort of transcendent quality of it. KING: Would the Catholic Church be least open to that? Mr. STRIEBER: No, I don't think so at all. One of the things that got me through this was- KING: Your Catholicism? Mr. STRIEBER: -my Catholicism and relationship to the Church. There was a point when this thing was really hitting me very heavily where almost the only things I had to hang onto were my family and my faith. KING: The book - Unholy Fire, from Dutton. By the way, Whitley Strieber is going to be on our radio show tonight. You might want to tune in there. We'll take more phone calls and he'll be with us for an hour. We'll come back with some more moments right after this. [Commercial break] KING: With Whitley Strieber - New Castle, Pennsylvania, hello. 11th CALLER: [New Castle, Pennsylvania] Hi, Larry. Whitley, I was wondering, what kind of response, if any, have you had from the Catholic Church or your other parishioners in your church? Mr. STRIEBER: Oh, it's complicated. I have some churches- I go to more than one church and some of them are rather uncomfortable with me, having me around. They don't know- Not because they think I'm a heretic; because they don't quite know what to make of me. I have had some very interesting responses from the Church, itself, but it was asked of me that I not speak about them publicly, but simply to say that the Church is very interested in this phenomenon. KING: Would you say on the record- You can't be off the record- Mr. STRIEBER: No. KING: -we're on television live- that more priests agree with you than would say? Mr. STRIEBER: The Pope? [laughs] KING: Do you think more priests agree with you than would publicly agree? Mr. STRIEBER: You mean about birth control and such? KING: About all your feelings, generally. Mr. STRIEBER: I don't know the answer. I do think that most of the clergy are with the laity on things like birth control, though, yes. KING: Thanks, Whitley. See you at the radio show. Mr. STRIEBER: Yes, see you there. KING: Whitley Strieber - the book is Unholy Fire, from Dutton.