Continuum Radio

Whitley Strieber is an American writer best known for his horror novels The Wolfen and The Hunger and for Communion, a non-fiction description of his experiences with non-human entities. Strieber also co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm with Art Bell, which inspired the blockbuster film about sudden climate change, The Day After Tomorrow.

On December 26, 1985, Strieber reportedly had an experience in which he thought he was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York by non-human beings of some kind. He wrote about these experiences in his first non-fiction book, Communion (1987). Communion is generally interpreted as a claim of alien abduction, but Strieber says that he draws no firm conclusions about the nature or source of his experience. He refers to the beings as "the visitors," a name chosen to be as neutral as possible, and leaves open the possibility that they are not extraterrestrials and even that they exist only in his mind. He has repeatedly expressed his frustration with what he feels are fantastic claims incorrectly attributed to him.

Communion was a Number 1 New York Times bestseller in the Non-Fiction category. Strieber went on to write three more autobiographical books about his experiences with the visitors, Transformation (1988), Breakthrough (1995), and The Secret School (1996). Each was commercially less successful than the last, with Transformation the only other title besides Communion to make the New York Times bestseller list.