Beyond Communion | The Key | Clear Talk with Constance Clear, Guests Whitley & Anne Strieber

Clear Talk with Constance Clear
KENS Radio AM 1160 San Antonio
12 January 2001

GUESTS: WHITLEY & ANNE STRIEBER

CONSTANCE CLEAR: Good evening San Antonio. It's a cold crisp day out there; I hope everyone is staying warm and moving fast. If you are listening in your car you'll want to go in and turn on your radio in your house the minute you get home; my show tonight is going to be that special. This is Clear Talk on KENS Radio 1160, and tonight my guest is Whitley Strieber. He's on his way into the studio now, so I'm going to tell you about what's coming up next week and then I'll introduce him when he arrives… oh, and here's Whitley now. How do they get in Alan? Do they have to go back around? They're out here. Can we open this door for them? Ok, great.
     Whitley and Anne – Anne came too! I'm so excited. I don't have to tell most of you about Whitley Strieber, he is born and raised in San Antonio, and is a world famous author. He's written, I believe twenty books now. His first thirteen books were fiction, and two of those were made into movies.
     Hi, Whitley. Hi, Anne. Grab a mic. Grab some headsets. It is such a privilege to have you here, I bet you went through hell getting here through the traffic.
WHITLEY STRIEBER: Well…
CONSTANCE: Whoops, wait, we've got to get you hooked up. OK, great, now.
WHITLEY: OK, we're here, that's the important thing.
CONSTANCE: Yay. Oh, man it was wild out there, the traffic.
WHITLEY: Yeah, it's been intense.
CONSTANCE: Well this is such a thrill. Not only are you a spectacular wordsmith, an incredible author, and an amazing radio show host, but you've also become dear friends of mine, and I am so grateful that fate or whatever it has been has brought us together– what do you suppose it has been?
WHITLEY: I don't know. We just seemed to pop up in each other's lives a couple years ago, two or three years ago.
CONSTANCE: Do you remember how we met? In a limousine in Alabama?
WHITLEY: No, I think we met before that. I think we met on an airplane.
CONSTANCE: Then we rode in the airplane, after the limousine.
WHITLEY: That's right. We met to on the way to a conference somewhere in the south; I don't remember where to be honest with you.
CONSTANCE: Mobile, Alabama.
WHITLEY: OK, I believe it.
CONSTANCE: That was the first time I saw you speak.
WHITLEY: Well, uh, good.
[laughter]
WHITLEY: I don't know what else to say!
CONSTANCE: That's great. Anyway it's been a pleasure, and I am so excited especially to be talking about your new book, The Key, tonight. This is an incredible book. It has had a very deep impact on me, so much so that I have been talking about it a lot on the show. But now we have the real person who can tell you how this came about, and share a little bit with our listeners of what it contains. This is really truly amazing.
WHITLEY: The way the book came about was interesting. I have had a number of unusual experiences in my life that I have written about. It started in December of 1985, when something happened that appeared to be a close encounter of the third kind. I've never known for certain what it was, except that it's become quite clear after, or it became quite clear after many months of medical tests and psychological tests and what not, that it was not an ordinary explainable experience. What appeared to be an encounter with aliens was something unusual. What it was I don't know. I've never known. I wrote a book about it called Communion, which really led up to a list of questions about what it might have been. Interestingly enough, the book was taken to be a book claiming alien contact and it involved a tremendous amount of controversy. Most people who just know about it vaguely even now assume that is what it was – some nut author complaining, claiming to have been contacted by aliens in order to make a buck. And that is the most revolting attitude about the book. An attitude generated by, I think, irresponsible people in the press and maybe others who just did not want to face the fact. And the fact – that it is not really possible to dispute it, I could easily win in a court of law – is that something happened that night that can't be explained. Period. End of story.
CONSTANCE:: Exactly. And why is it so hard for us to accept that there are things that we can't explain?
WHITLEY: People hate to live with questions. The more educated they are, the less they like questions. As a result of which, the people who really ought to be thinking about them don't. And that's a shame. Because this society wastes all of its educational money and effort on people who won't think. So why do we do it? I don't know, personally.
CONSTANCE: I think that is why our kids are in such despair in school, because they know they are not being challenged to open their minds. Not to follow their heart, or their passion. They're being trained to shut up and conform.
WHITLEY: Yeah. Close down, shut up and do what you're told. And I'm sorry, that is not enough.
CONSTANCE: [laughs] You've been very bad at that, haven't you?
WHITLEY: I am terrible at that! I'm just the original bad boy.
CONSTANCE: Bad, bad, bad.
WHITLEY: I love it.
CONSTANCE: Thank God for Anne, sitting here on your left side. Anne, I am so glad you came, thank you for joining us.
ANNE STRIEBER: Thank you.
WHITLEY: There's somebody over there who can keep up with me. She's just as bad, if not worse!
CONSTANCE: So what is it like to be living with this man who has had a phenomenal impact on the world, on many of us? I know I've talked to people all the time who were just coming to grips with their own encounters, and most of them awakened reading Communion. I mean say whatever you will about the book, the book had so much truth in it that if it resonated with your own experience it was something you could not deny.
ANNE: Well, it's been tough. Because the UFO world is a ghetto. There are nice people in it, there are interesting people in it, but it is a ghetto. And I am a white middle-class person, grew up a Protestant now I am a Catholic, I was never ghettoized. I was always in the mainstream. Nobody ever looked down on me, I fit right in. And so it has been strange. It hasn't all been pleasant. I don't know if I would have changed it if I could have, but it was too late, I was swept away. What's the Chinese curse? “May you live in interesting times.” I've lived in interesting times. I would like to have a future a little less interesting, I think.
CONSTANCE:: You are ready for a little respite?
ANNE: I don't know. It's hard. It's like having a red “A” on you except it's a red UFO. It's tough. You know that, though.
CONSTANCE:: You and I kind of are exempt from perceiving these things or experiencing them, and I keep saying look, I'll do whenever I can to get the word out and help, just please don't show up in my bedroom.
[laughter]
CONSTANCE: Because I think it's still so frightening, even though I like many people am fascinated by the subject, and I am grateful to be doing the work I am doing, but it is still frightening. And I guess that is why people tend to discard the messenger along with the message.
WHITLEY: Right. It really makes me mad because there is certainly something unexplained happening. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that it is true. It is definitely true. If you look at UFO video, if you take the witness of millions of people who have seen them, if you take the witness of hundreds of thousands of people who have had close encounters, of course something is going on. Do we know how to explain it? No we do not know. Not yet. There has never been a serious scientific study of UFOs. You find so much videotape of them from around the world. It would not even be very costly to deploy a system of sky watching cameras that could not only observe these things as they move, but count them and count their frequency, and find where they are coming and going from. I mean at least locally. But no one tries. No serious effort, no serious scientific effort is made. No effort is made to apply the tools we do have to this both psychologically and in the physical world to solve the problem and to answer the question. Instead, we bury our heads in the sand. But why? What are we scared of?
CONSTANCE: And some of those meanings are revealed in your book, The Key?
WHITLEY: Well, maybe. I don't know. I never know about my books. After I've finished one of my books I am always in a really weird state. But I must say that if The Key is what appears to be, and I have to be honest with you, I think it is, then it's a very – the guy who I met was important, and what he said was important, and have had to be faced. That's the truth of it.
     Let me tell you how I met him and what happened. (Which I probably started out to do at the beginning of the show, but don't worry about it, it's going to be like this the entire evening. We'll eventually get to the question, but it will take time.)
CONSTANCE: Let's take a break right quick, we'll just tease our listeners…
WHITLEY: Ok.
CONSTANCE: You're going to have to stay tuned to hear this incredible story, The Key. We're with Whitley and Anne Strieber in the studio tonight. That means you can be part of the show by calling in.
…
CONSTANCE: At 3 o'clock in the morning on June 6, 1998, Whitley Strieber was awakened by somebody knocking on his hotel room door…
WHITLEY:…He thought that it was room service. Why did he think it was room service at 3 o'clock in the morning? I don't know. Well, my tray was still there, and I figured… I'd been on an author tour, which means going from bookstore to bookstore, and place to place, talking about your book and signing books and trying to drum up excitement about a book. At that time, it was a book called Confirmation. So it was the last night of the last stop on the author tour, and the next day I flew home for good, and I was really had a pretty good mood. I was also exhausted, I went to sleep about ten, I didn't know it was 3 o'clock in the morning when the knocking started. So I jumped up, I thought it was the room service waiter, I threw the door open and a guy came in – very quickly walked right into the room. It was not an alien, I hasten to add. It was just a man. An ordinary enough looking person wearing I believe a black, a brown, a grey turtle neck and black pants, and looked to be in his early seventies, but trim, well put together. He was in good physical shape. What crossed my mind at that moment was, oh my, I have ended up opening my door to somebody who wants to talk to me about whatever, about my book or something else, and the fact that they're here at 3 o'clock in the morning means this is going to be a bad conversation. I had had in the same author tour about a month before, in a hotel in Chicago, a person bribed their way into my room and while I was lying there watching television stepped out of the closet to try to have a conversation we me.
CONSTANCE: Oh my gosh.
WHITLEY: This caused an upset, to say the least. I ended up going down to the front desk in my pajamas – I called the security, they did not answer. It was a – I've forgotten what kind of hotel it was, I won't say it was a Hilton because I am not sure it was. Anyway, so I was really primed for this guy and I though, boy how stupid can you be to let this happen. He walks across the room, stands in front of the air-conditioning unit in front of the closed curtains and starts talking. And he talked very quickly in a sort of breathless voice. And I'll tell you what hooked me. I asked him why are you here – at this point I'm still thinking he might be a…
CONSTANCE: A waiter.
WHITLEY: …something official. Maybe there was something wrong with the hotel, I mean maybe he was. And he said, “you are chained to the ground.” and I thought excuse me and said, excuse me? And he said, “I'm here on behalf of the good. Please give me some time.” He said it just like this, “I'm here on behalf of the good please give me some time.” And he said it in such a gentle way. He sounded like a really good man, I have to tell you that. He sounded good. So I start a conversation with him. Why not? I mean he certainly seemed harmless enough at least. And you never know in this kind of work, I mean, it's hard as Annie said, because we are all ghettoized. Half the people listening are laughing up their sleeves at these nuts on the radio, when the truth of the matter is we really have something solid to talk about. Something very important. That's the reality of it. But anyway you meet interesting people in a place like this kind of world we live in, all kinds of unusual people.
CONSTANCE: Especially when you are out there like you are.
WHITLEY: Yeah. Or you. I mean we both have had the experience. I mean, this is how we met each other after all. So, yeah, I was open to it at that point once I realized that he wasn't going to talk my ear off about politics or something. I was very open to it, yeah. And it turned out after about five minutes I grabbed a pad because he was saying things so fast and so complicated and obviously so smart, that I needed to take notes. And I took notes, and I'm very glad I did.
CONSTANCE: Oh, absolutely that was a divine inspiration.
WHITLEY: Wasn't anything divine about it.
[laughter]
WHITLEY: It was just that, I mean I thought that there was very interesting material there. The guy was talking about some amazing things, and they were really huge ideas. Bigger ideas than I was used to thinking about, and I just wanted to take notes. So that is what I did. And I thought afterwards that we had been together about 45 minutes, but it turned out we were together for more like, oh my, probably two hours.
CONSTANCE: So in the middle of the night someone unexpected knocks on your door, comes in and begins to impart to you this incredible wisdom.
WHITLEY: It is incredible wisdom in there, yeah.
CONSTANCE: I must say I read very few books, which is bad to admit since I am interviewing authors and I should be reading their books but, I am very very picky. But this book I am reading for the third time. My husband sat down and read it cover to cover, and the other person who had access to read it also read it cover to cover and was making trips over to my house to be able to sit and finish reading it.
WHITLEY: A lot of people have that reaction to it. That's good. I have gone, as Annie knows, back and forth for years about whether or not I should even publish it, and the reason is, what if I'm wrong about what he said? What if I got it wrong? Or, what if it was all a dream? In fact, tell what I, what happened the next morning.
ANNE: You called me up the next morning and you said, remind me if I ever say that this didn't happen, remind me I told you it did happen. I had to remind you that many times.
WHITLEY: Yeah, because these experiences that are on the edge, people who've never had one do not realize what happens. What happens is after a few days you don't believe it yourself.
CONSTANCE: Right.
WHITLEY: I knew that, and that is why I phoned her.
CONSTANCE: Because we want so badly for things to fit in our preconceived notions, in our categories.
WHITLEY: We want the world to fit together the way it's supposed to. And when something comes into your world that doesn't fit you want to get rid of it.
CONSTANCE: I remember hearing you speak in Florida shortly after you had this experience, and you were on fire that night. I had never seen you so passionate. You were talking about this experience and I was anticipating that your next book would be this experience, but that's not what happened.
WHITLEY: No, because a) I was very uneasy about whether or not I should write it for the reasons we just discussed, and b) this was hard. I thought while flying home the next day that, oh my, I've got a cool book here, I am going to write this right away, it's going to be a piece of cake, I'm going to be back out in a year, and it's going to be really neat and full of interesting information. The guy was so cool and so fascinating and fun, I'm going to find out who he is and I am coming back to meet him again and blah, blah. I had all of this in my mind. Three years later…
CONSTANCE: [laughter]
WHITLEY: …finally, a pretty thin book is out. It's like 120 pages. 105 pages. And I think it contains more of value than everything else I've written all put together, frankly.
CONSTANCE: You had to wait for this to come back in to you, for bits and pieces of it to return to you.
WHITLEY: Yeah. It came back, not like I expected, to sit down at the computer, at the word processor, and just write it all up with the notes beside me and get it all put together in a few weeks. It was real difficult. Because these ideas are hard to think about. They are hard to think about because they're not the kind of ideas we are used to thinking about.
CONSTANCE: My experience reading it was so much of it you just say to yourself oh, I knew that, oh yes. It makes sense but there were ideas in there that were like a twist that I had never read anywhere else.
WHITLEY: Well that's right. It's full of these sorts of twists.
CONSTANCE: Like, well, I don't know where to start. I want to let you share what you want to share about it.
WHITLEY: For example, he talks a great deal about God and religion and the nature of the soul. He talks about the amazing fact – which turns out apparently to be true – that there is the possibility of verifiable contact between the living and the dead and how that would all work. How we can use scientific instruments that we possess now, it's not even very difficult. It's extraordinary.
CONSTANCE: When we get back from this news break we can get into some detail about that.
WHITLEY: That's right, we should.
…
CONSTANCE: Welcome back, you're listening to Clear Talk… tonight my guests are Anne and Whitley Strieber. We're talking about his incredible, and almost Earth shattering (if that's not too strong an adjective) book, The Key. This book is not available in bookstores. You can get it by going to WhitleysWorld.Com, which is your web site.
WHITLEY: That's right.
CONSTANCE: Or you can call 1-800-898-0284.
WHITLEY: During the day. It's not open at night.
CONSTANCE: I know that because they also had my book, Reaching for Reality, which I always forget to mention. So you can order both! But be sure to get The Key. This is, we decided-we were counting-your twentieth book.
WHITLEY: Twentieth book, yeah.
CONSTANCE: And how do you feel about this book when you compare it to the other ones that you have written? I'm sure they're kind of like children or something, each book.
WHITLEY: Oh yeah, well you know, you have a love hate relationship with your books. As soon as I opened it I found typos.
CONSTANCE: Oh no.
WHITLEY: But, um, minor typos I might add. Because the fun part of this book was in this sense: It's published by my own company and the cover design was by Louis Steiner, my web master who is a good friend, and I set the type myself. So it's a real labor of love. I wanted this really very close to me. I couldn't see giving it to my publisher because they would want to come back and edit it. And the man said what he said. I can't edit it. It's uneditable. You have to just go with what was there. And I was sure that people would not understand some of it, they would want some of it to be changed, so I published it myself.
CONSTANCE: What a good feeling. That's freedom.
WHITLEY: Yeah, well you've done that. It is freedom. It's a wonderful feeling. And also, the other thing is, it turns out that there's whole lots of different levels of quality of a book.
CONSTANCE: Yes.
WHITLEY: And this book like has a four color permanently laminated cover, it is a thing of beauty, it's meant to be like a work of art, and they're not going to do that for you at a regular publishing house. If you want the very best paper, and the very best bindings, and the most beautiful possible book, well this is how you do it – you do it yourself.
CONSTANCE: It's a remarkable accomplishment. And it's easy on the eye; I like the way you laid it out.
WHITLEY: Thanks. I chose the type and it was really fun, I mean for a writer to get involved in this level of it is very fun. To actually be sitting there and doing that typesetting on the computer. I mean I hasten to add I wasn't sitting in a little room with lead type…
[laughter]
WHITLEY: …I was sitting at a computer with PageMaker. But it was as close to that experience as you can get in modern times. It was fun.
CONSTANCE: The cover is unusual. For people who haven't seen it, you've got to go to WhitleysWorld.Com to see this cover.
WHITLEY: We decided as soon as we saw the cover, which is a picture of a hand holding out a key, offering a key, Annie said don't put any type on it at all. And that's just what you see when you see the cover. It's a black background with this hand holding this key. It's dramatic. I autographed a couple thousand of them, and I'm tired of the hand holding the key right now.
CONSTANCE: [laughter]
WHITLEY: You get to the point where, autographing and autographing and autographing, and you think, are we there yet? And we are not there yet. That's only the first of eighteen boxes.
CONSTANCE: Oh jeez.
WHITLEY: It's intense.
CONSTANCE: But that's a good problem to have
WHITLEY: Yeah, it is. And I think the book's going to have a life of its own. The man who I called the Master of the Key, whoever he was, was a marvelous person. I'd like to talk a little bit about who he might have been because it's such an interesting mystery. When I was face to face with him, you know when you are face to face with someone like a I am with you or with anyone in the room, I don't know the engineer at all I don't even know your name, but I don't believe that you could disappear from my life forever. It doesn't feel like that, and it didn't feel like that with him because he was just a guy. A very brilliant guy. But I couldn't find him. I called the publisher, I mean the publicist in Toronto who had been taking me around, I even mentioned him I believe the next day to her, and I called some of the other people. Because you'd think a person with a mind like that would be known. I had been on some radio programs that were really sort of intellectual level type of programs; it's not nearly as sensationalistic on Canadian media as it is here in this country for the most part. So, there's an intellectual community in Toronto, and you'd think the guy would be known to people. A man like that, he would be a college professor or something. Nobody.
CONSTANCE: Nobody knew anything about him?
WHITLEY: The most interesting story, the thing that came closest was actually from someone here in Texas. A man who was taught a musical instrument, in fact he's become a very proficient practitioner of this instrument and quite famous, he was taught this by a member of the Houston symphony orchestra back in the 60's or the 70's I believe. This man, this musician was considered to be one of the greats in his field. He kept very much to himself, he did not seek notoriety; no concerts or solos or anything like that but he was considered… he had a huge reputation in his field. He never let anyone into his apartment. He did not like to be touched, or to touch people. When he was touched he would generally wash his hands, if someone shook his hand or something like that. One day this friend of mine to his amazement was invited into the man's apartment. He said Ok and he goes into the apartment and he finds it's filled with bookshelves. The books were technical books on things like radar and every UFO book ever written. Strange, in a musicians apartment. So he sees all this stuff, he's there with the man for awhile and he leaves. A little while later there's a fire. The apartment is totaled. Totally gutted. One of the most unusual of fires because the books, you know a book when it is closed there is no oxygen between the pages so only the outside edges will burn but not the whole book.
CONSTANCE: I've seen books like that.
WHITLEY: It's like ashes [on the outside], you open it and it is all still white. Not in this case. The fire was so hot it reduced every single thing in the apartment including the books to ashes. To ashes.
CONSTANCE: What could cause that?
WHITLEY: No one knows what caused that but here is the strangest part. It was confined just to the apartment. It did not burn anywhere else in the building. It did not even burn the apartment above it. There was water damage below, but that was it. As for the man himself, no trace of his body was found, no bones, nothing in the apartment. He's never been seen since. That was it.
CONSTANCE: Have you got any physical description of this man?
WHITLEY: I'm not sure if it's really that close. It could be close but it was hard to tell. The striking thing about the man I remember seeing was that he was very trim and he was not tall. He was of average height or below average height. And my friend did not seem to remember that his teacher was like that, so maybe it was not the same person. But that was the closest I came. Now it's interesting that there are a couple of people who have written in who have had experiences. One of them even in Toronto with a man who sounds kind of similar. And these are people who remember have not yet read the book, so they don't know anything except what they've seen on my web site about him.
CONSTANCE: So you may yet get more information.
WHITLEY: That's right. There may indeed be more information forthcoming. But you know, there are other things. We're going to get in a little while into the most fascinating story about the past of Canada and something practically nobody knows. Back in the thirteenth century the Knights Templar, which was at that time the most powerful religious organization in Europe, immensely wealthy with an extraordinary and strange history that I'll go into in a few minutes, were attacked by the Papacy and the broke French king who wanted their dough. And among other things, a massive mule train of hundreds of mules, each one packed with treasure from the Templars left Paris on its way to Scotland and ended up in Scotland. The surviving Templars – for most of them were killed – the surviving European Templars ended up in Scotland under the care of the Sinclair family, who where then great lords in Scotland, and there begins a tale that could very well lead to The Key.
CONSTANCE: We'll get to that after this break…
CONSTANCE: Welcome back. If you are just joining us my guests tonight on Clear Talk are Whitley and Anne Strieber. We're discussing his twentieth book, The Key, which is a phenomenal book. I'm reading it for the third time. You know this book not only confirms some things that I had always known deep down but it has helped me reconcile myself to some of the feelings I've been having; a feeling of urgency, a feeling of something extremely important. But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I want to get back to the story you are telling before the break about the Knights Templar.
WHITLEY: Ok. Before we go on with the story I want to read something from The Key. And this relates because this is one of the statements in there that made me think about the Knights Templar, originally.
     I asked him who are you? Christ? Or a demon yourself? He said, “stop thinking this way. This is no longer the Middle Ages. Be objective. Remember that all of God is in everything. The whole of creation is the matter of God. Nothing is separate from God nor can ever be. Your sense of independence is an illusion so that you can take the journey of discovery. So also, no matter what you may call me, I am in God.”
     This is a very messianic idea, and a very Templar idea. Now let's go back to who they were, and how they may relate to this in an unusual way. The Knights Templar after their leader Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake and they were broken up in Europe ended up in Scotland under the care and with the help of a number of different Scottish families, primarily the Sinclair family. Henry Sinclair who was the head of the family became one of the founders of – not one of the founders but one of the beginnings, not one of the official founders, but one of the originators of what became, later, Scottish Masonry. Now, he allegedly went with a group of Templars to Newfoundland. Another group of Templars went to the Caribbean, and there is a fascinating thing about this because you know the pirate flag the Jolly Roger? The black flag with the skull and cross bones on it?
CONSTANCE: Yeah.
WHITLEY: You know what that was? That's the Templar battle flag.
CONSTANCE: Oh my.
WHITLEY: That was their battle flag back in that time. And low and behold when the Spanish came into the Caribbean they found that flag flying on ships – small low-to-the-water ships being run by Europeans who they assumed to be their own people, and who may actually have been remnants of the old Templars. But anyway, going back to Newfoundland, Henry Sinclair built… there are ruins on Newfoundland which may be a castle he built. Maybe and maybe not. He brought a group of Templars and their families with him to try to find a place for them that they could be safe. There's a little island off the coast of Newfoundland called Oak Island. Oak Island is known as the money pit because it contains on it the most intricate, deep, and complicated system of man made caverns in the world.
CONSTANCE: Oooh.
WHITLEY: Somewhere down at the bottom of this thing is a treasure of an unknown kind left by the Templars, apparently. Even Franklin Delanor Roosevelt was interested in Oak Island and invested in trying to find the Oak Island treasure. He was also a very very advanced Mason and knew a lot of the deep Masonic secrets – secrets that not even 33rd degree Masons in this country anymore are privy to. But the Masons in Canada still have a lot of these secrets in their hands. This man who I spoke to said some very interesting things about himself. He said at one point, “I am a Canadian but I don't have a driver's license and I don't pay taxes.” It's interesting, when I told Canadians that, they said it would be very very hard to live in Canada without being identified because it is a very socialist state and you need identification in order to function. Unless you had always been there. If his family had been there before Canada was even Canada, it would be very possible to be like that. In other words, maybe what we were dealing with here is a person who was a direct descendant of Templars who came to Canada long before it was discovered by anyone else in Europe, and who has the ancient Templar knowledge intact. And maybe some of that is in this book. Which is why it's so cool.
CONSTANCE: That's awesome.
WHITLEY: Yeah.
CONSTANCE: That just must be one of the most exciting things you've…
WHITLEY: Oh it's terribly exciting, of course it is. It was so fun to work on it for that reason, as I worked on it and realized this might be the case. This could be the case, I can't prove it, but it's a lot of fun to think about.
CONSTANCE: So this money pit, this treasure trove, probably contains secrets, truths, as well as possibly valuables.
WHITLEY: Even modern technology and equipment cannot break the secret of the money pit. We haven't gotten to the bottom of it even yet, and it is an amazing construction. Is at least from the fifteenth century and may be before that. It is an awesome feat of engineering and a very very strange thing. We'd have trouble building it even now.
CONSTANCE: Even now. And so you have to wonder if they didn't have a little assistance.
WHITLEY: You just don't know what they might have known and what they might have accomplished and what they might have been doing. You do not know. But they were something special. Seven men went to Jerusalem after finding a document in a church in I believe southern France. They asked permission of the Pope – the Christians at that point, after the first crusade, they ruled Jerusalem, so they could go there- they asked the permission of the Pope to work in the context of the grounds of the ancient temple, of the Jerusalem temple. They dug tunnels under the temple which are still there today. No one knows what they found there. They were supposedly protecting travelers along the roads in Palestine but actually they spent all their time working there. And whatever they brought back from there made them very quickly the wealthiest and most powerful order of Knights in Europe. So they gained some kind of incredible knowledge.
CONSTANCE: And knowledge is power. You know, I want to share with our listeners some of the concepts that he was sharing with you that night, one of the most basic of which that touched my heart was the idea that humanity is all one.
WHITLEY: Yes, we are all one.
CONSTANCE: And that some of the biggest problems that we face today have to do with the secrecy, the secrets that are kept from us, and that we are drowning in our own wealth.
WHITLEY: We're not drowning in their own wealth, we're drowning in greed. We are like a bunch of caterpillars and it looks like we're going to eat up the leaf before we turn into a butterfly because we are really hurrying mighty fast. We are beginning to have the kind of problems, energy problems in our country that are fundamental. There's a reason that goes very far beyond the issues of power plants being taken offline and so forth that is causing the disastrous power outages in California. That issue is basically there ain't enough oil and there ain't enough gas. That's basically the problem. We are going to have to live with those issues for the rest of our lives more than we ever have in the past. So yeah, there's every reason to look to a book like this or to a person like this man who has such wonderful things to say about being human. He speaks, for example, about the difference between a culture of blame and a culture of compassion. As soon as you say compassion to people they say the we can't be compassionate toward someone who has committed a crime, he's got to be slapped down, put in jail, thrown into prison and throw away the key. Forget him. But real compassion looks to what a person truly needs, truly needs, and gives it to him even if it is a hard thing. Even if it's hard. So true compassion is not all sweetness and light. But if this was a compassionate society in some senses everything would be the same but everything would be so different and so much better.
CONSTANCE: We are told to love thy neighbor as thy self, but part of the problem is we don't love ourselves, we judge ourselves so we judge our neighbors. And when he's saying that we are all one and that in a compassionate world each of us would delight in giving every other person we meet exactly what that person needs most, that makes total sense to me.
WHITLEY: Yes. As long as we had the courage and the intelligence to understand what other people really need.
CONSTANCE: Right, and that would be a problem, we've got a long way to go. He also talks about the Holocaust and the effects that has had.
WHITLEY: Yes he does. He says some very - that was one of the first things he said, we hadn't been together five minutes before he said this. He said, he said something about the most important thing in the last age and asked him what it was. The last age meaning just until right now, just the past say…
CONSTANCE: 2,000 years.
WHITLEY: …the past 2,000 years but the most important thing in the past 2,000 years. He said the most important thing about the last age was the Holocaust. And I said the Holocaust was the most important events of the past 2,000 years? And he replied, “You were meant to have acquired the ability to leave the planet by now but you are still trapped here. You may be irretrievably lost. This is an absolutely fundamental importance become the earth will soon be unable to support you. And yet you will not be able to leave. This is because of the Holocaust. The destruction of six million may well lead to the destruction of six billion. So it is the most important events by far, of the age.” I reacted to that with anger immediately because I thought I did not do this. We did not do this. We fought against it. Members of my family shed their blood in the fields of Europe to stop this, and he's telling us that because of that we are being punished? And so I said, why has the Holocaust prevented us from leaving the planet? He says, “The Holocaust reduced the intelligence of the human species by killing too many of its most intellectually competent members. It is why you're still using jets 75 years after their invention. The understanding of gravity is denied you because of the absence of the child of a murdered Jewish couple. This child would have unlocked the secret of gravity,” presumably when he grew up and became a great scientist, “but he was not born. Because his parents went, the whole species must stay.”
CONSTANCE: On that note we're going to go into our news break. Stay with us, we'll be examining more of the truth contained within Whitley Strieber's new book, The Key, which you can purchase by going to WhitleysWorld.Com.
CONSTANCE: Welcome to the second hour of Clear Talk. If you are just joining us tonight, we're having a fascinating discussion; in the studio with me tonight are Whitley and Anne Strieber. I can't imagine there's anybody out there who doesn't know who they are, but Whitley is the author of 20 books. He's written thirteen fiction books and six, now seven, nonfiction books including the book we are discussing tonight, The Key. He's also the host of a very popular, very huge radio show, Dreamland, which is carried Sunday nights from eight to eleven on one of our competitor stations.
ANNE: Eight to midnight.
CONSTANCE: Eight to midnight? Four hours, wow. Boy, that's a lot isn't it?
ANNE: It is.
CONSTANCE: And Anne, you are his producer for that show, is that right?
ANNE: That's right, I'm sitting there.
CONSTANCE: So you're sitting there and you are doing a lot of the work. It's just so exciting. We both kind of got into radio at about the same time.
WHITLEY: Yeah, we have, and it's been fun doing it as friends, together. It's been lots of fun.
CONSTANCE: I sure appreciate it. Whitley's been a tremendous help to me in my work with the clients that I have seen who have had experiences with extra terrestrials. He's encouraged me, he's given me an incredible quote for my book, Reaching for Reality, which is, gosh, you know, I went on Art Bell one time and the first thing they did was read your quote, Whitley, and the guy goes, “wow!” I feel so lucky. But I want to shut up and let Whitley talk because you all get to hear me talk all the time. Now, before the break we were talking about the impact of the Holocaust on humanity…
WHITLEY: And what he said about it. He made me mad because I did not feel responsible for this. And I said, you are saying the catastrophe we are facing now of too many people and no ability to leave the planet is punishment for the Holocaust? He answers, “what is happening is consequence, not punishment. The Holocaust was triggered when economic disorder combined among the Germans with a feeling of being trapped due to over-population. The resulting explosion drove the German tribe to lash out against other tribes especially the one that lived in its midst. Unfortunately they murdered the bearers of the intellectually strongest genes possessed by your species.” Or was that also by his species? He was very coy about that. I asked him once during the course of the conversation, what is your name anyway? He said, “if I said Michael…” I then said, an archangel in a turtleneck? and he says, “Legion, then.” I said, I think you're a perfectly ordinary person with an ordinary mother and an ordinary name. He responded, “I can imagine no greater honor than to be called human.”
CONSTANCE: Wow.
WHITLEY: He also talked constantly over the course of the whole conversation… If there is any single theme - it is a very Christian piece in many respects, but if there is any single theme – it is about becoming what he called a “radiant being.” And he talks in many different ways about the radiant body and what the radiant body may be, and how to become a radiant being and what that would be like. Now, on November 17 of 2000 I was at mass and I was reading my missal, and one of the readings leaped out at that me. I was stunned by what I read. And here are the verses that so shocked me. These verses speak of the End Times. And they are:

“And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great Prince which standeth for the children of the people. And there shall be a time of trouble such as was never seen since there was a nation even to that same time. And at that time thy people shall be delivered, everyone that shall be found written in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake; some to ever lasting life and some to shame and ever lasting contempt.”

And this is the part that really amazed me.

“And they that shall be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever.”

That's Daniel XII 1 to 3.

CONSTANCE: So this is the radiance?
WHITLEY: This is the radiance that he talked about, exactly. He even said the word, used the name Michael.
CONSTANCE: Michael.
WHITLEY: Amazing. To me it was amazing. Of course someone could say, oh, well, he worked it all out, he read [the verse], he knew of Michael. If only you were a Catholic you'd know how bad we are at reading the Bible.
[laughter]
WHITLEY: Bible study is not something we traditionally do much of! And I really did not come to that verse in the Bible until just within days of the book being finished. In fact I had to actually rewrite the end of it to get that in.
CONSTANCE: That's just amazing. We've got a caller who's got a question for you. We'll bring him on. This is James. Welcome to Clear Talk.
JAMES (CALLER): Thank you, Constance. Whitley, I have a question. You mentioned earlier about the Templars. Is it possible that that gentleman may have been a member of a brotherhood, an enlightened group? You mentioned also that his attitude, his demeanor, was that of someone being so enlightened that the information may have been something that has been around for so long that people forget about it and then when it comes back up again, or resurges, everybody thinks oh this is something new, but it has been around for – how long?
WHITLEY: Maybe forever. You know, there's an interesting thing about these brotherhoods, or sisterhoods, whether or not they exist: I have never found one. I have come fairly close once or twice to such a group. For example, the Illuminati, they existed. That was a real Masonic group or associated group. I know a fellow who collects Masonic texts as a hobby who has an initiation manual for the Illuminati that was written in, like, 1906. So it was quite real at one point. The Rosa Crucians were quite real. but did they possess actual extraordinary knowledge? did the Templars, even? I don't know. But he gave no impression of being a member of such a group, nor did he say anything that would imply that. And unfortunately I did not think to ask him. I was so interested in the ideas, that the kind of “where you from?” sort of stuff, or who you are… you see it in the course of the conversation, it sort of comes in and out when it sort of crosses my mind, that hey, he's really interesting and I don't know who he is even yet. And I ask another question about that and he gives another sort of subtly evasive answer and we go on.
CONSTANCE: But you sensed in his presence radiance about him?
WHITLEY: Oh yeah, he was really wonderful. He was a wonderful person. You could…oh, gosh, yes. You could feel it. I mean this guy, there were things right at the end of the conversation, he said the words, “when you sin you hurt yourself; but more than that you are cruel to all the rest of us. You are cruel to God.” and I swear to you when I hear those words and I remember the sound, the tone of his voice when he said “you are cruel to God,” you just… you can't imagine what it was like. He was… he made me shrivel up inside when he said that, but also there was a kind of joy connected with it because we are tempted by various types of sin all the time. But you hear someone say something like that and from then on the feeling of temptation changes. You don't feel like you want it any more. You want to be… you come away, you want to express your goodness into the world after you hear something like that.
CONSTANCE: I had a similar reaction the first time I heard Dannon Brinkley speak which was actually the same weekend I met you at that conference in Mobile. He talked about how in your life-review you experience everything in your life from the other person's perspective. And I thought, oh my gosh, and since that day I have not yelled at a person on the phone, not that I did often but sometimes I did. I haven't yelled at another driver. I became more sensitized to the fact that if there is that deep connection. If I'm going to experience that later, then I'd better be careful. And then in your book I come to find that, yes, we are all one and what you do to that other person you are doing to yourself.
WHITLEY: I've been doing a lot more reading of the Bible. There is now a Bible by my bedside, which there never was before him, in my life. I found out some things from that Bible that might lead to some answers about who he was.
CONSTANCE: Ok, and we'll be exploring that in just a moment. You're listening to Clear Talk, stay with us.
…
CONSTANCE: We are going to have another person joining the conversation. She's been on Clear Talk before, this is a woman who goes by the name of Kaylee when she comes on the radio, and some of you know her. Kaylee has been blind from birth and grew up to be a high school band director, a feat I find utterly amazing. She plays almost every instrument there is. She later became a massage therapist and now is a hospice volunteer. She made an amazing discovery in the last year or so. Kaylee, are you with us here?
KAYLEE: I think so.
CONSTANCE: You think so? Good. Say hello to Whitley and Anne Strieber who are here in his studio.
KAYLEE: Oh, what an honor this is, you guys. Three people who are so wonderful, and I am on the phone with all three of them.
CONSTANCE: You are faithful listener of Coast to Coast and Dreamland?
KAYLEE: Oh yes.
WHITLEY: Thanks.
KAYLEE: I was thinking how weird it is to hear Whitley through the phone instead of through the radio.
[laughter]
CONSTANCE: So just for our listeners sake, I know you've come across a realization in the last year and I've been dying to get you together with Whitley because you are two of my favorite people on the planet.
KAYLEE: Oh, what a sweetheart.
WHITLEY: What was the realization?
KAYLEE: My best friend was the one who started digging it up. I kept telling her about these dreams I would have and different things that would happen to me that I did not care for. And she finally said, you know I think you ought to go look at Constance Clear's web page and read some of that stuff, I think maybe aliens are messing with you. I was like, oh man. So I went up there and read Constance's page and I thought, oh no [laughs], I guess they are. I had experiences where they would drop me, they would leave me outside instead of putting me back where I came from. I would wake up at the grocery store in the middle of the night, standing there at the door thinking I would go in but of course it was locked. I thought I walked there in my sleep, that's what I thought, but I don't.
ANNE: Well you know they usually do not leave people where they picked them up. It is some kind of message to them. It is almost always that way.
CONSTANCE: But poor Kaylee! I mean, she's blind, she does not know where she is, she does not know when it is.
KAYLEE: If you can see where you are that is one thing, but if it is the middle of the night… I have a seeing eye dog and I was, thank goodness, dressed - I kept thinking one of these days I am going to be naked out here. I would just be so bewildered, asking myself did I walk here and cross all those streets? It is just dangerous to do that to a blind person. I finally got them to quit doing that.
ANNE: You've got to get them to take the dog to.
CONSTANCE: They did.
ANNE: Oh, OK.
KAYLEE: They took the dog too, but see, you've got to tell the dog what you want it to do, and you have to know where you are before you can do that.
ANNE: Whitley took our cat, once.
WHITLEY: Yeah, I took one of the cats. They acted like I was some kind of a nut.
ANNE: He wanted to take a camera, but he couldn't grab the camera, but he grabbed the cat.
WHITLEY: No, I grabbed the cat, which was right beside the camera and ended up with a cat instead of the camera.
[laughter]
KAYLEE: Well it was a C word.
CONSTANCE: So who though you were a nut – the cat or the aliens?
WHITLEY: No, the little, the people I was with, these people. They finally gave the cat, gave her a shot and she totally collapsed and I'd thought they killed her. I was really upset.
CONSTANCE: Oh my gosh.
KAYLEE: The ones I know can make animals very ill.
WHITLEY: Well you know, this is an interesting kind of conversation to have because we are never sure exactly what this is about. Are they aliens? Or is there something else that we can't begin to understand? Are they human beings from the future? For example that would be one possibility. All kinds of things it could be. Other dimensions. Physicists use to say that there are many dimensions but they are so tiny that nothing could really live in them. But now it is being thought that that is not accurate that actually there is a very large other dimension that completely surrounds us and it could be that they are from another dimension, which would explain why people have seen them walking out of their closets and stuff.
KAYLEE: Yeah, they do like closets.
WHITLEY: I knew a psychiatrist in New York who read Communion and then sent us a letter because she had had the experience of lying in her bed reading on the upper west side when suddenly the closet door flew open and a whole line of these aliens, a kind of Conga line of these cats come dancing across the bedroom and go out through the wall. This lady, she was an elderly Germans psychiatrist, she said [accent] “Zis happened. This is no hallucination; I know hallucinations and what it is. This was real!” And I said how do you feel about it? She says, “I am not very comfortable with zis!”
[laughter]
CONSTANCE: I was telling Whitley during the break that as a little child you use to grab them because you were quick.
KAYLEE: Oh yes I would grab them.
WHITLEY: What did it feel like?
KAYLEE: Their skin sort of felt like pantyhose. You could stick your fingers through it really easy. I was not very nice to them because they would to grab me around the neck. And I have a thing about that. I don't like things grabbing me around the neck.
WHITLEY: Oh, how unusual! [laughter] That makes you unique in the world.
KAYLEE: Usually I would be sitting on the floor because they would let me play with the little babies. But they don't like me seeing them or talk to them or anything that you do to babies, they just want me to touch them and mess with them. But when they would to grab my neck when I would do something they didn't like, I started being very ugly. I would either stick my fingers through their skin – they don't bleed, though – or I would break their legs; they are really easy to break, sort of like, let me see… not a stick, easier than stick. Maybe a… each would make a snap sound but it was a little bit flexible like a chicken bone.
WHITLEY: Did they get upset?
KAYLEE: No.
WHITLEY: No?
KAYLEE: No, and the next time you would see them they would not even act like they…
WHITLEY: Because I mean, do they walk on the broken legs?
KAYLEE: They would sort of raise up in the air a little bit and then come down, and the broken part wouldn't be as it would be on us, it would just… and it was really disconcerting. I thought, good grief, if you cannot scare them that way what could you do? And I figured out that the worst thing you could do was start screaming. They hate that. But I broke a lot of legs just because I was so angry that they would not let go of my neck. And the skin thing would close up right away as soon as you took your fingers off of it. After I made a tear in it, it would just heal right up.
WHITLEY: How did you come to these memories or thoughts?
KAYLEE: [pause] I think it was, when I first started to remember I would remember from now, and that would remind me of something before that. It would go backwards sort of like if you were reading a book backwards that you started at the end of it. I just started remembering. It was like if you opened a door when I said, OK, this really did happen, and that really didn't just walk in my sleep to the grocery store at four in the morning. When I admitted that maybe it was not just a dream then I started remembering. And I found people that remembered the same kind of stuff, which really was kind of cool.
WHITLEY: But you know, something happened. You are talking to someone who has had something not quite that, but similar happen, and a have to ask the question always, what-what-what was it, really?
CONSTANCE: I'm going to interrupt you right there. I want you to be thinking about that Kaylee, and you can give us your response when we get back from this break.
…
CONSTANCE: I'm having a good time tonight, I've got Whitley and Anne Strieber in the studio with me, Alan is our engineer tonight, and we've got Kaylee on the phone. If you've been listening, right before the break Whitley asked Kaylee a question. Both of them have had strange unusual unexplained experiences, and the question was what-what-what-what are they really? Kaylee, you've had a moment to think about it now.
KAYLEE: I can't… I think there's definitely is a form of communication going on that does not happen in the daytime or when I am awake, or when I am talking to what we call regular human beings. I would say that for sure. But whatever it is I can't really come up with a definite answer. Whether it is… you know you wonder sometimes if it is…ah, I don't know what it is. I can't. If somebody said I'll give you a million dollars if you tell me what it is for sure I couldn't, because I don't really know.
WHITLEY: Of all the experiences I had, there was never one that was an absolutely normal every day waking consciousness. But I do know of two cases where people did have such – three cases – where people that have such experiences.
CONSTANCE: Where they remained lucid?
WHITLEY: It was during the day. In two cases it was during the day, the third case was at night. But they were completely conscious and lucid when it happened. And it's very interesting because one of the people is a good friend of ours, Raven Dana, who is going to be on Dreamland in a couple of weeks to talk about this. Raven was a person who wrote us a letter back after Communion came out…
ANNE: We met her on an author tour.
WHITLEY: Oh, that's right, I met her on an author tour, yeah. And she just seemed really cool and really well put together and smart, and had had these experiences. Annie and I got to know her, and she used to come to our cabin with groups of people.
ANNE: Because when she came things happened. She's kind of a catalyst.
CONSTANCE: This was in upstate New York?
WHITLEY: Upstate New York where I'd had my close encounter. The one time, she was in bed and something came in through the window. And what was interesting is the screens were, at that cabin, were actually screwed closed. I had gone through the whole close encounter thing and at that point there was nothing in that cabin you could get into easily. She thought at first it was a raccoon. And it came and sat on the foot of the bed. We'd been trying to get the visitors to come. We'd been going out and chanting, going out and lurking about in caves…
CONSTANCE: [laughter]
WHITLEY: …and doing everything we could possibly hope. A whole bunch of us. There was another person in the room actually who saw this too. And we have low light cameras set up, there was a documentary film crew there, I mean we were really working that night. And she held out her… she heard him say what can I do to help you, or something to that effect. Or heard it in her head. He had a smell, he smelled like loam. She said it was like a little forest creature. He was very small. And she said, “I felt like it was an animal. I didn't have any feeling that it was a human being and it took me a couple of minutes to realize that what I was facing was not a raccoon, and that it could not have come in through the window,” because on the window was a screen that you could not take out. So she suddenly, she helped out her hand, it touched her hand and she said it's touch was cool and very light as a feather, the fingers. Long, thin fingers. And she said it said what can I do to help you? Or, what would you like me to do? Or something like that. And she said, “well, you can go out and walk down that hall” – which of course would have given us a beautiful picture on the low light camera that was out there.
CONSTANCE: She was thinking.
WHITLEY: So it disappears out the door, and she thinks it has worked. Then people in another room get an eyeful of it, too. But here is the most telling thing. The next morning she comes out of the room she was in, and she's like… remember what she looked like?
ANNE: I think she felt ill, them she?
WHITLEY: She was. Her face was all puffy.
ANNE: Like an allergic reaction.
WHITLEY: An unbelievable allergic reaction. Her eyes were like slits. She had an ultimate allergic reaction. Now here's what is interesting about this. A police officer in Brazil a couple of years ago found one of these little creatures sitting in the road after some children had reported – this is a famous case, the Varginha case – and he got it. He stopped and he picks it up and put it in his lap and takes it to the police station. he is there, they give it to the military and they never see again. he gets sicker and sicker and sicker, two weeks later he bleeds out like an Ebola virus victim. in other words, an overwhelming allergic response and he just completely goes to pieces. and I thought to myself, boy you know, Raven was really at the edge there. she was really at the edge. and that's where we actually all are - we are at the edge because there is something very real about this, Kaylee, in the physical world that we say we just don't know because whenever it is, it never lets us or we can't quite get it to focus. but when it does focus, it is just as real as you and me.
KAYLEE: I don't want one of those things coming around me.
WHITLEY: No.
KAYLEE: I have furballs that come in here and visit my bunnies. Their little balls that roll around and the bunnies play with them. I don't know what they are, I know this sounds terrible but I'm just going to go ahead and say it.
CONSTANCE: Go for it.
KAYLEE: I kept thinking, what has that rabbit got? What is it playing with? I mean, it wasn't playing with something in a rude way, but just playing with something, and there's nothing in there. So one night I just up my hand in the cage and this little ball of fur rolled across my hand and I said, what are you? And it said, “a fur ball,” and it was gone.
CONSTANCE: [laughter]
WHITLEY: You know you are not the only person who has reported [something like] that.
CONSTANCE: Really?
KAYLEE: Oh, good.
CONSTANCE: I knew there was a reason why I wanted the two of you to talk.
KAYLEE: I told my best friend, I told her – she doesn't think I am crazy, I don't care what I tell her, she's OK with that – I said I love these little things I wish I could... but now that you are telling me about the raccoons I don't think I want to hold one. But they were so quick to disappear.
WHITLEY: But you can't actually see them because you're blind?
KAYLEE: No, no. But they've been in here a lot. It just happened that I happened to stick my hand in the rabbit cage at the right time and they were so busy playing that they did not realize they were going to roll over my hand, I guess. I was going to curl my hand over it to get one but it got away. Then I was going what are you, what are you? And the bunnies, they're real used to them whatever they are.
WHITLEY: That's fascinating.
CONSTANCE: Now Whitley, what story had you heard about these furballs?
WHITLEY: I can only describe what people have seen. We have cases where they will see these balls of fuzzy light.
CONSTANCE: Oh!
WHITLEY: Fuzzy light. And the way you are describing it, if it has a substance, it probably would feel very much like what you felt. Or it would seem, from your description.
KAYLEE: It wouldn't be something you could squeeze like a ball because if you try to squeeze it, it just disappears. If it were light, that makes sense to me that it would not have a middle to it, it would just be a round… but if you touch it, it feels just like bunny fur.
WHITLEY: Well who knows. Who knows.
CONSTANCE: We have a couple minutes before the break, I know you have the question for Whitley.
KAYLEE: Whitley, you know how you hear about blind beggars? I never have been one but I'm going to be one today. I wish you would record your book on tape so that people who can't read print could read it. Even though we would miss that cover.
WHITLEY: I've got to figure out how to do that, because I've never made a book on tape myself before.
KAYLEE: Since you publish your own… you see, usually the reason why people can't do it is because the publisher blah blah blah. But if you published it yourself you can decide whether…
WHITLEY: Oh yeah, I could definitely do it but the question is I've got to find a place that makes the boxes and you know get down into the nitty gritty. It's not magic, it turns out.
KAYLEE: Either that or make it into an e book if that would be easier.
WHITLEY: But an ebook wouldn't help you because it would still be on the printed page.
KAYLEE: It would be in your computer two you could read it with your speech.
WHITLEY: Oh, you have a speech reading program.
KAYLEE: Yeah. But don't do the kind where you have to have Adobe acrobat or any of that, just make it regular old ASCII text so that anybody could read it with it.
WHITLEY: Well I think I'd rather do a tape. I want to do a tape any way, so that's what I may do.
KAYLEE: I wish you would.
WHITLEY: Yeah, I will.
CONSTANCE: Yeah, with you reading it.
WHITLEY: I like to read anyway so I'll…
KAYLEE: Oh do you really?
WHITLEY: Oh yeah I do. I like to read my books. Most of my books I've read myself. [Editor's note: Not true, most were read by the late English actor Roddy McDowall.] Art Bell and I read Superstorm together which was a lot of fun.
CONSTANCE: Oh cool, and that was an awesome book, too. OK, we're going to take this last break. We've got one more segment. We'll be back with the termination – ooh, that's a bad word – the culmination of the conversation with Whitley and Anne Strieber.
…
CONSTANCE: We're here in the studio live with Anne and Whitley Strieber and we've got Kaylee on the on the phone. An incredible thing has happened. Kaylee was telling us a story that she is probably a little reluctant to share because it sounds so bizarre, and Whitley's response was, oh yeah, he's heard that elsewhere.
WHITLEY: But it is true. This experience, a close encounter experience, is very very very very strange. I was just telling Constance off the air a minute ago about a story, a lady we actually met, a very nice lady who had the experience of seeing a giant insect face peer into her tent on Mt. Shasta. She had become concerned upon seeing this for any number of different reasons, not the least of which was probably “why have I lost my gourd?” And she looked out of the tent after about a half an hour and saw these things that looked like 70 ft. tall praying mantises. And I thought to myself when she was telling me this story, this is it, this is the weirdest and the funniest story I'm ever going to hear in my life. And the slate is totally unique. She has had the funniest and scariest hallucination I've ever heard. Now, I've got in our files at least five or six letters from other people from other parts of the country or the world who have had the same experience. Now what does that mean? Where is this thing really coming from, when that kind of thing can happen?
CONSTANCE: Let me share one with you. This came up with Teresa, one of the contributors to my book. She has a ring that she takes off and lays on the bedside table at night. She woke up the next morning and this ring, a gold ring with a diamond it, was squashed into an oval. So squashed she could not get it on her finger. She took a to the jeweler. He fixed it. Two weeks later it happened again. Now I thought that was pretty bizarre. I was in my Saturday group a couple months ago. A person who does not even know the first lady but lives in the same vicinity waits until the end of the meeting – you could tell she was really reluctant to share this – and she said this strange thing happened. She was walking out of her bathroom and turning down the hall when all of a sudden she felt this excruciating pain on her finger. She looked down and saw her ring was squished on her hand.
KAYLEE: On her hand!
CONSTANCE: She took it off. She got it off with soap – she could barely get it off. She takes it to the jeweler – and I started laughing at this point because I am picturing the same jeweler in this small town – and two weeks later she's walking out of her bathroom and it happened a second time. She says, you know, I'm afraid to wear that ring any more. Whitley, have you ever heard a story like that?
WHITLEY: Of rings, in particular? No. I don't think so.
ANNE: But Whitley, you dropped your glasses off a boat once.
WHITLEY: Yes.
ANNE: And these were identifiable glasses because he'd had one of the screws replaced on the fret and it was a different type of screw that they put in.
WHITLEY: Right.
ANNE: And he dropped them off a boat and they went down, down, down. He had to drive home in his dark glasses at night. So we figured we would never see them again, and then they were on his bedside table.
WHITLEY: Typical Strieber family experience.
CONSTANCE: They thought, he's a writer – he's got to have his glasses!
ANNE: Of course you couldn't prove this to anybody else but we knew it because we recognized them.
WHITLEY: Yes, immediately. We had…I was bringing my – we had a nice boat in those days, we used to boat on the Hudson, it was just beautiful. And it was about 10:30 or 11 at night and I'm bringing the boat in, we get the boat all tied up at the dock, and then I fall into the river.
ANNE: You stepped backwards, if I remember right.
WHITLEY: Stepped off.
KAYLEE: That sounds like something a blind person would do.
WHITLEY: That's what I became immediately thereafter because as I sank down into the water thinking my this is going to provide many people with lots of amusement. The first of them is going to be Anne. Of course I come up, and I hear her happy voice saying “are you alright?” and I have no glasses.
CONSTANCE: At least he floats!
WHITLEY: So I try to go down, but I feel the current is strong and I think oh no – we're not on the Hudson, we're on a creek near the Hudson, that flows into the Hudson – and so I get out of the water and that got to drive home. She's not the world's most spectacular driver, so I am trying to drive and they end up driving in the middle of the night in dark glasses through the countryside.
ANNE: Because you had those in the car.
WHITLEY: So those glasses were gone. They were history, they were over. A year or two later in our apartment in New York City, ninety miles two the south of where the glasses were dropped into a river in the middle of the night, I wake up one morning and they are lying on my bedside table.
CONSTANCE: Oh my gosh. So they didn't return them immediately, they just waited to be sure you'd recognize them.
WHITLEY: I'm sure it took them a couple years to find the damn things, and I'm not surprised.
CONSTANCE: They were down there looking, thinking if we can just find these glasses we can prove it to him!
WHITLEY: But how? I remember what I said, I said look at the screw! And Annie remembered.
ANNE: I thought it was kind of the message, like maybe you should look more carefully.
CONSTANCE: Look more carefully, mmm.
ANNE: We're big on metaphor.
CONSTANCE: We've got another caller. Let's get him on quickly and then I'll give you a chance to give us some end thoughts. Tony, welcome to Clear Talk.
TONY (CALLER): Hello Constance, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. This is the first time I am talking to Whitley. Whitley, I want to congratulate you on your newest publication and I wish you a lot of luck with it.
WHITLEY: Well thanks.
TONY (CALLER): I listen to you frequently and as a matter of fact I do some radio with Constance once and while. I am very good friends with Constance, and I want to give you a little thought I got as I was listening to you. I am a state section director for MUFON here in San Antonio, as a matter of fact I am the one who sends you a letter every month.
WHITLEY: Oh, sure.
TONY (CALLER): I'm getting the feeling from the people who I speak with at our meetings, many people who have had the abduction scenario occur in their lives that there is a “oneness” coming from mankind, believe it or not. I get the feeling that people are saying that we are one. And this is why when who ever it was that was in your room was speaking to you, I get the feeling that – I know you felt some anger in regard to the Holocaust, because like you said your family spilled their blood in trying to remedy the situation over there – but I think he was just speaking of us as one; mankind, if you get what I'm saying.
WHITLEY: Exactly. That's one of the main themes, actually, of the conversation was this concept of oneness. Absolutely and definitely. I'll give you an example. “The work of the demon among you is to deceive you into believing that Christ was better than you. Christ said it: I am the son of man. Christ is all, all are Christ.” That is the sort of thing that he spoke about and in the end of the conversation he speaks about the destiny of humanity as being, as becoming one. And how we are responsible, all of us, for each other. He says “every joy, every sorrow, every good, every evil, belongs to all. All are responsible for all. All are dependent upon all. Humanity is one.”
CONSTANCE: Ooh, yeah.
TONY (CALLER): I capture that same feeling at my monthly MUFON meeting. I am trying, as Constance knows also, she knows me very well, I am trying to put the compassion back into MUFON.
WHITLEY: Yeah? Good luck.
CONSTANCE: What do you mean “back” into?
ANNE: They get pretty mean, sometimes.
WHITLEY: It's getting better, though. There are a lot of cool MUFON groups around the country.
TONY (CALLER): Oh, definitely. What I am trying to do is not keep it so analytical and so calculating. I mean we need stats and we need research, but they are people who need compassion, also. I'm trying to find a happy medium in there. And that is why your book kind of ties in with the feelings that I am getting from the MUFON group. It falls in so beautifully.
CONSTANCE: And you're doing a great job. Thank you so much.
TONY (CALLER): Thank you Constance, you take care. And Whitley. Anne, it was great to hear you on the air also.
ANNE: Well thank you.
TONY (CALLER): You take care.
CONSTANCE: I want to give out this 1-800 number again because people are going to want to get ahold of this book, The Key. It's 1-800-898-0284 or visit WhitleysWorld.Com. I think we have about one minute left.
WHITLEY: The book incidentally is $19.95. I chose the price; it's cheaper than most by a bit. So anyway, we have about a minute left, I would like to leave you with some word from the Master of the Key. I asked him, so how are we to approach God? What is the nature of this infinite being that resides in every grain of sand? And he said, “when you say God, you think of somebody outside of yourself. You think as the age of worship thinks. Over the last age, the elemental body was changed by this process of worship. It is not the same as it was 2,000 years ago. Now the receptacle is larger. Now each of you can contain all of the universe. That was not true then. Now this is a species of sacred beings. But you are babies, and so still ignorant of your powers. The last age was the age of the external God. This is the age of God within.”
CONSTANCE: Oh, this is just so profound. I really appreciate your coming down tonight. I thank Kaylee for being on the line with us, and James and Tony for their calls. This is always a fun thing to do, and it has especially been special tonight. You've got to read this book, there's a whole lot more. We just barely scratched the surface.
WHITLEY: Thanks a lot for having me, Connie. It's really been a pleasure. And I think I'm supposedly the only person who actually calls you Connie. I'm sorry Constance.
CONSTANCE: I'll answer anything to you, Whitley. Sweet dreams, San Antonio. ~