Keep Watching the Skies for the Cops

Confirmation: The Hard Evidence of Aliens among Us

This book was written by: Whitley Strieber, author of The Wolfen. Mr. Strieber’s other books, Warday and The Coming Global Superstorm, have proven that he can provide measured, non-alarmist views that are sorely needed in the field of alien abduction, a subject where "the lack of authoritative answers has meant that hucksters and false experts have been exploiting public ignorance"(p.87). However, as an alien abductee and implant recipient himself, Mr. Strieber is worried that aliens may be controlling his thoughts. He has published other books on alien visitors, but "when I read the books months after writing them, I could see a disturbing difference between what I had written and what I had intended [....] I appeared to have become a propagandist for aliens"(p.221).

What is in this book: An examination of the evidence for the existence of extraterrestrials. If space aliens do not exist, "this would mean that a part of humankind has technology so extraordinary that the rest of us are virtually a different, lesser species, confined to an overcrowded, dying planet while the others traverse the heavens like gods"(p.81). Some of the evidence reviewed by Mr. Strieber could be explained by human involvement, and "if there are aliens here and they have co-opted our own military and intelligence infrastructure, then there could be the very combination of human and apparent alien activities that are being reported"(p.248). That may sound a little paranoid, but "in this society, someone who isn't at least somewhat paranoid probably isn't entirely sane"(p.232) and Mr. Strieber offers exhaustive proof of his own sanity. The government has already been provided with the evidence discussed in this book, but "if—fantastically—the data really have been ignored just as the government claims, then we need to stop doing that"(p.74).

What is not in this book: Probing, anal or otherwise. This book contains zero occurrences of the word "probe," and only one instance of "probing," in a context where it is being done by a human surgeon. Mr. Strieber does not understand the public fixation on purported alien colonoscopies, asking "even if this sort of script were commonplace, which it is not, why would the UFO stories take such a frightening turn?"(p.91)
However, "if our close encounters are indeed with aliens, wouldn't they have an obvious motive for obtaining sexual and genetic material?"(p.93), and the aliens have no aversion to violence, as seen by their involvement in scenarios where "one witness's head explodes, another goes blasting through a windshield, a third is slammed in the chest, [and] a fourth gets attacked with machine guns"(p.100). In fact, "the visitors may be at once tempting us with their theater in the sky and forcing us into action by the outrageous invasion of our bodies represented by the close encounter"(p.259).

Would you recommend this book to a fourth grader? Yes. Like a nostril, "the deeper you mine the close encounter experience—always refusing to submit to the temptation to rush to explanations—the richer and more profound are the questions it returns"(p.171). In fact:

One of the strangest implants ever found was contributed by Dr. John Mack. Expelled from a witness's nose, it is described as an organic, plasticlike, three-lobed fiber with an internal structure organized into intricate layers in a seemingly irregular manner. The specimen was a 'tough,' pinkish-colored, one-inch-long, kinky, wirelike object. A pathologist found it to be about twenty to thirty microns in thickness, and it could be stretched out more than three inches. It was reported to have a gelatinous sheath with bumpy outcroppings; it was clearly not a hair(p.236)

Would you recommend this book to an exotic dancer concerned about losing her job to illegal immigrants who received cut-rate cosmetic surgery from shady overseas clinics? That would be a hell of a reach just for a joke about "alien implants" but it would totally be worth it.

What was interesting about this book? White spaceman's burden. On Earth, "as technological civilization spread, the native cultures that weren't subjugated and destroyed succumbed to irrelevance and died,"(p.256) which makes it likely that alien visitors have refrained from contacting us directly because they do not want to ruin the developmental purity of our race. This hands-off approach of theirs means that "the visitors are not going to give us anything. But what we can take, we can keep"(p.252), so it's time to get aggressive. "To wrest knowledge from them, we need to be tough and smart and courageous, not passive and secretive and scared"(p.253). In other words, we need to become intergalactic carjackers.

_{Confirmation: The Hard Evidence of Aliens among Us by Whitley Strieber (St. Martin's Press, 1998, ISBN 0-312-18557-X)}