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The Super Natural

A New Vision of the Unexplained

by Whitley Strieber
and Jeffrey J. Kripal


Select articles below Notes

Pre-publication notes about The Super Natural (published Feb 2, 2016)

Whitley Strieber, writing on GoodReads in April 23, 2015, stated
     “I have completed Super Natural with my collaborator, Jeff Kripal, the Religion Chair at Rice University. It's going to be published by Tarcher/Penguin in February of 2016.
     Jeff is a religion scholar who specializes in modern myth. He is open-minded about the UFO lore, but like me, thinks of it in a much broader way than the usual aliens are here/not here argument.
     Since the beginning of history and no doubt before, human beings have been influenced in some way by light. A whole culture arose out of Moses vision of the burning bush. That culture was radically altered when Paul was startled by a flash of light on the road to Damascus. Mohammed was guided by a being of light in his cave. And nowadays, these plasmas or whatever they are seem to be everywhere, and there are apparent aliens to go with them.
     So what is all of this about and, above all, why is this enormously important player in human affairs not studied?
     These are some of the questions explored in Super Natural. Tarcher/Penguin will be calling in the most important book on the supernatural since Charles Fort published the Book of the Damned in 1919. I hope that it is seen as that and its suggestion that we re-envision the supernatural and the paranormal is embraced. If we do that, it will lead to a fundamental change in the way we view and understand our world and along with it a much-needed expansion of our vision of ourselves and the universe in which we live.”

Pre-publication notes about earlier plans for a non-fiction book (which possibly became The Super Natural)

Whitley Strieber, writing on his official discussion forum on 7 Sept 2010, stated
     “I am working on my first nonfiction book since Confirmation, which will be an attempt to advance the debate from ‘are they here or not?’ to ‘how do we come to understand what they are doing to us?’”


A note from BeyondCommunion.com
Whitley was not expected to return to writing memoirs about his own alien encounters. In 2010 this site reported:
     Whether there is more to say may depend more upon the visitors than upon Whitley; he has said that his contact experiences essentially ended when he left upstate New York in late 1997.
     Many experiencers have reported a sense that the abduction project has concluded, though some sort of mental contact seems to have continued; the question now is whether open contact will occur, and whether humankind's perceptual abilities will expand in a meaningful way.
     “What's really interesting [is] two years ago all these close encounters abruptly ended,” Whitley told the University of Colorado student newspaper in 2001 — referring not to own experiences, but rather to experiences among the people in general.
     A realted observation was made by the Times Herald-Record, a newspaper which covers New York's Hudson Valley — the area where Whitley Strieber's cabin was located. In an article headlined “Pine Bush outgrows UFOs” (Times Herald-Record, Steve Israel, 9 December 2005), the paper asks “Pine Bush - Where have all the UFOs gone? Check out the list of sightings on the menu of the Cup and (Flying) Saucer diner. The list stops in 1999.”
     In June 2003 Whitley affirmed that mental contact continues: “Most abductees and close encounter witnesses have had the experience of mental communication with the visitors. Indeed, this seems to be the primary form of communication, as so many have reported. I experienced this myself, and continue to experience it.”