The Super Natural by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal

Years ago, when Rob and I had been married just four years, we walked into a bookstore in a mall in a Fort Lauderdale, Florida mall, and immediately spotted a book with an alien face on the cover, a grey alien with wide, almond-shaped eyes, almost no nose, and a tiny mouth. Without saying a word to each other, we both made a beeline toward the display case, reached for the book at the same moment, then looked at each other and laughed. It was one of those moments that came to define much of our next 29 years together. The book was Communion, by Whitley Strieber.

Our fascination with the nature of reality, UFOs, aliens, and everything else that goes bump in the night, led us into freelancing writing for OMNI Magazine in the mid-1980s, where we covered UFO conferences. We spent a weekend with abductee Betty Hill, met author and UFO researcher Budd Hopkins and were present for one of his hypnosis sessions with an abductee in Lake Worth, Florida. It was Hopkins who told us he’d been working with a famous novelist who had experienced a series of encounters and had written a book about it that would be published soon. That day we found Communion, we knew Strieber was the author and Communion was the book.

In the years after, we followed Strieber’s career, devoured his books. But it wasn’t until 2009 that we actually had contact with him. The editor for Trish’s book Esperanza, worked at the publishing house that had published some of Strieber’s books, and asked him to blurb her novel. He did so and in 2010, when 7 Secrets of Synchronicity was published, he invited us to be guests on Dreamland, his podcast.

That’s some of the background. But now comes Strieber’s newest book co-authored with Jeffrey J Kripal, a historian of religions and the J Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University. The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained is one of the best books I’ve read in years.

Strieber and Kripal have alternating chapters, a structure that works well for the book. Kripal takes parts of Strieber’s lifelong narrative about the nature of the “visitors” and looks at the material as an academic whose specialty is comparative religions. I initially thought, Huh? Really?

And then I opened the book on my iPad and read the first line, of the first chapter, written by Jeff Kripal. “I am afraid of this book.”

And I immediately liked this man and the fact that he and Strieber had teamed up. That first sentence is followed by:

There is something about it, something explosive and new. It is not a neutral book. It is an apocalypse of thought waiting for you, the reader, to actualize.

And then Kripal lays out the premise of the book, that he and Strieber explore the idea that we are all embedded “in a much larger fiercely alive and richly conscious reality that is only, at best, indirectly addressed by everything the human species has ever thought believed.”

From the beginning of Strieber’s encounters with the visitors, he has always looked at them as evidence that the nature of reality is far more complex, intricate and strange than current scientific thought understands. Kripal explores Strieber’s experiences in light of his own expertise and notes:

“Consider lines like this one, from Whitley’s The Secret School: ‘The vague mythological beings of the past that have focused into the aliens on the present will soon become our selves as we become the very time travelers whose shadows haunt all our history, including the present.”

Kripal writes, “That is the kind of mind-bending comparative practice that we are after here. To really name it, define it, and practice it, however, will take the work of both an experiencer and a theorist working together, in deep conversation and mutual criticism.”

What follows in this book is a journey so provocative that there is an ineffable quality about it. It’s not a book I can lend to my neighbor and say, “Read this and you’ll know you’re living in the matrix.” Or read this and you’ll understand the nature of encounters and abductions.

My neighbor, like me, may very well be living in the matrix. But this book won’t prove it to her. What it will do, though, is to teach her to question consensus thought about everything she believes to be true and to dig more deeply into her life for answers. For people like Rob and me, this book actually deepens the ultimate mystery about who or what the “visitors” are, their connection to the dead, and how it all fits into the matrix we call reality.

As Strieber says early in the book, “…we’re still at the beginning of the journey when it comes to finding useful questions, let alone viable answers.”

Not surprisingly, The Super Natural is a journey into Jungian archetypes – the outlier as hero. Kiplar is one of the hero’s sidekicks, one of his Pancho Villas. But Strieber’s wife and creative partner, Anne, was the muse who defined the insights of his experiences. As Strieber writes in the introduction, he and Anne evolved their approach to the super natural together.

“She provided three foundational insights. The first is that the close encounter experience is something unknown and must be kept in question. Second, that the question must be deepened and can only be resolved by scientific and academic inquiry…Third, that, after reading in excess of two hundred thousand testaments from the public about close encounter experiences, she was able to say with authority that close encounters with apparent aliens often include perceptions of the dead as well.

“It is on her rigorous questioning and tireless inquiry that my own insights deepened.”

So, as Kripal said in the beginning, I was afraid of this book. But by the end, I was steeped in the ultimate mystery, hungry for more.

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Our interview with Whitley on Dreamland goes up this weekend.