When we take the time to look back at the history of the UFO phenomenon in popular culture, perhaps no book has had an impact greater than Whitley Strieber’s groundbreaking 1987 work Communion. This was a book that, on the one hand, caught the world by surprise, depicting shocking, discombobulating encounters with beings of a decidedly otherworldly nature, despite the fact that the experiences seemed to be happening – at least partially – very much in physical reality, and were experienced not just by Strieber, but also by his family and by guests to his cabin in upstate New York.

While shocking in its claims, one can easily make the argument that the reason the book had such an impact on popular culture is related to the fact that so many people resonated with the material within, and – even more pointedly – with the now iconic cover of the book, depicting what has since become known as the quintessential “grey alien”. The being depicted on the cover of Communion was not only provocative, but also – to many thousands of people around the world – strangely familiar. Of course, the question that inevitably arises from this fact is: why?

Were these memory fragments suggestive of a reality where untold numbers of human beings were being abducted in a similar manner to Strieber? And, if so, what did this mean of the nature of the apparently extensive enterprise these beings were in the midst of conducting? Perplexingly, while elements of the encounters seemed to be happening in something like an alternate state of consciousness or in an alternate, ethereal realm, other elements, involving medical examinations and the extraction of reproductive, genetic material, seemed suggestive of a much more “down to earth” purpose, perhaps involving the hybridization program that has become such a lynch pin of our contemporary understanding of the Phenomenon.

These questions were of paramount importance in 1987 when this book was first unleashed upon the world. Since then, the significance of the material has only become even more pressing – as many of the future visions experiencers like Strieber had then have seemingly come to pass, suggesting we are even closer to some consequential turning point in human history; a moment these beings spoke so pointedly about. Because, to be clear, the encounters did involve warnings; warnings that seem particularly prescient in light of how things have unfolded in human civilization since the time of Strieber’s initial encounters.

And, importantly, the messages have not stopped being communicated. Even during a recent series of conversations I had with Mike Masters, chief proponent of the so-called Extratempestrial Hypothesis – the notion that some of these beings are our very own descendants from some future point in humanity’s evolutionary trajectory – additional elements became clear, aided by synchronistic events suggesting these overarching intelligences are not only able to defy our understanding of physics, but sometimes even able to orchestrate an ordering of the very events of our lives.

But to what end? And in preparation for what? Who are these beings, and how are their efforts to not only interact with us, but to chart a new evolutionary path forward, related to the events arising in our midst even as we speak; events that threaten our very place on the planet as we have known it? These are just a few of the questions we’ll seek to engage with in this, the 103rd episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

While the modern UFO era may have begun with the emergence of saucer sightings in the early to mid 20th century, that picture eventually grew to include not only those initial sightings, but also reported interactions with the supposed beings piloting these sophisticated, non-conventional craft. Yes, indeed “aliens” – or as they’re often called in modern ufology circles – non-human intelligences, often to clarify that we don’t actually know where they’re from, just that they’re not human – at least we’re pretty sure of that fact – if by “human” we mean beings akin to contemporary homo sapien sapiens. Of course, as we’ll see in today’s episode, that clear cut distinction between us and them might not be so easy to delineate after all, but we’ll get to that.

From sightings of supposed alien beings – or, apparently non-human but very often “humanoid” beings – the picture filled out even more, to include the now infamous abduction phenomenon, where modern earth humans are taken aboard craft – often from the comfort and quiet of their bedrooms in the middle of the night – where they are then subjected to a wide variety of experiences, including – in some cases of a perhaps less apparently positive nature – invasive medical procedures and supposed hybridization programs, and – in more apparently positive reports – opportunities to see the cosmos and even, on occasion, to learn to maneuver the craft, often via mental intention alone, no less.

In terms of the beings often seen, while there really is a broad spectrum of others, one particular form has come to represent the quintessential “alien” in our cultural zeitgeist. Here I speak of the proverbial “grey alien”. The emergence of this particular form had much to do, one could argue, with the front cover of Whitley Streiber’s ground-breakin and nerve-rattling book, Communion, published in 1987.

Of course, that image wouldn’t have made the waves it did if it were not for the fact that many thousands of people reportedly recognized that prototypical face – sometimes, much to their chagrin. After all, if they recognized the image, if it was somehow familiar to them, even if murkily so, did this mean they too were perhaps alien abductees? These were chilling questions for a plethora of human beings to contemplate.

Of course, the fact that these beings were – if not exactly human-looking – then certainly humanoid, raised many questions. Why would an alien being look so much like us? Wouldn’t the evolutionary trajectory of their own home planet take them in very different directions? The conventional thinking on these matters assumed this would be the case, and it’s partly this that led to so much ridicule and scoff. Many took these humanoid forms as a good reason to ignore the entire affair altogether. It’s as if these people decided that since aliens wouldn’t look like this, the entire affair must be reducible to make believe or delusion.

And yet, the enigma of this particular form of “otherness” has endured, to the point where it’s now a mainstay in our cultural heritage, both for those who believe and don’t believe aliens are here, and are actually interacting with human beings on an ongoing basis. Of course another possibility that’s emerged more recently, and this would explain why these others look so much like us is they may actually be us – but us from the future; our descendents, who have been taken in some strange evolutionary directions based on future events.

So what is it? Are greys from an extraplanetary source – i.e. are they extraterrestrials? Or are they future humans, what Michael Masters has aptly deemed “extratempestrials”? Or is it possible that both options exist? And, furthermore, could the prevalence of this form, and its evident ongoing connection to us, point towards an even deeper and and more primary construct – that might not only speak to common origins, but perhaps also to a common terminus – maybe in the form of the singularity that rushes to meet us at the end of our time? These are the perplexing yet fascinating ideas we’ll endeavor to explore, in this, the 78th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

It was at this time last year that the inaugural edition of the Point of Convergence podcast was launched. In that very first edition I discussed some of the broad brush topics I planned to cover in the coming weeks and months. I didn’t know exactly what direction the podcast would take, but I had a strong sense that it would attempt to weave together topics that are often taken as distinct and disconnected: topics such as alien beings and the UFO Phenomenon, psi phenomena such as psychokinesis, telepathy and clairvoyance, and the mystery of life and death, revealed with growing clarity through phenomena such as out of body experiences, and even more so, near death experiences.

I also understood that central to our inquiry would be the underlying role that consciousness seems to play in connecting each of these subjects – which are often collectively referred to as “the contact modalities”, almost like spokes in a wheel. Over time it has become increasingly clear that, as I recently heard it put, it’s not so much that we possess consciousness, as that we, on the most fundamental of levels, are consciousness.

Somehow, despite the temporary sense of separation we often experience in this particular earthly iteration, we are actually part of capital “C” consciousness, which, as quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger put it: “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. There is only one thing and that which seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception, the Indian maya, as in a gallery of mirrors.”

While the UFO Phenomenon, which has been our most central topic of inquiry, might at first seem like it doesn’t belong in such a conversation, I think it’s clear, based on the various cases of contact with non-human intelligence that we’ve covered over the last year, that nothing could be further from the truth.

Indeed, the connection between UFOs and aliens, with psi phenomena and out of body and near death experiences, is not even secondary and subtle, but often quite immediate and direct. In fact, we’ve come across cases where deceased relatives show up in the very same encounters where people meet and interact with apparently alien beings. We also know that the altered state of consciousness that experiencers of the UFO Phenomenon frequently describe involves striking overlap with elements of out of body and near death experiences.

Now, speaking of those various experiences of contact with apparently non-human, alien entities, it has been informative to see how different people have described different kinds of experiences in cases we’ve covered over the last year. While there are too many striking similarities to count, there have also been some striking differences, perhaps suggesting, as I’ve postulated for some time now, that we’re dealing with different elements within one totality we conveniently, colloquially title “the UFO Phenomenon”.

Now that we’ve reached the one year mark of this podcast, while also reaching the end of this calendar year, now seems like an apt time for a retrospective of sorts, looking back to compare and contrast the various elements of these otherworldly, anomalous experiences.

Over the last 365 days or so, we’ve covered nine specific cases of contact with alien intelligence. And now we’ll seek to take an overarching view of those cases, considering in what ways they’re similar, as well as distinct, and in what ways they did or didn’t somehow touch on the other “contract modalities” we discussed earlier, in this the 53rd episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

In the 1980s a book that seemingly came out of nowhere, a book that the author purportedly had a very difficult time actually finding a publisher for, took the world by storm. The book, with the provocative title of Communion, featured the image of a face of a very peculiar creature: one with an oval head, large, almond-shaped eyes, and a decidedly pointed chin.

The book was authored by Whitley Strieber, a well-known fiction writer of the time; a writer who had numerous well received and best-selling titles under his belt by the time Communion was published. The image on the cover of Communion of course went on to become the quintessential face of the alien all over the world, partly because, shockingly, that face bore a strange, uncanny and, to many, disconcerting familiarity for people all across the globe.

While many might at first have assumed that Communion was a one-off; a book describing one man’s harrowing tale of an encounter with supposedly alien, or at least, decidedly non-human, intelligent entities, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality Strieber continued to have ongoing encounters with these seemingly otherworldly entities, encounters that were filled to the brim with elements of what has come to be referred to as “high strangeness”.

Furthermore, as Strieber sought to grapple with the nature and meaning of these adult encounters, he began to realize there was a peculiar familiarity to these Visitors – as he came to call them – that stretched well back into his childhood; even though he had repressed much of those memories in his early adult life. Now it was all coming flooding back, making the entire matter all the more overwhelming and bewildering.

He followed Communion with a second book titled Transformation that, from in my opinion, is even more enthralling than its predecessor, because it involves a degree of perspective and clarity that was simply unavailable to the author at the time he penned the first book. In Transformation, Strieber not only describes the bizarre and sometimes terrifying nature of the encounters he had and continued to have, but he begins to offer a kind of response, at first somewhat feeble but growing in intensity and boldness as the months rolled on and the events continued happening.

It is not a stretch to describe the kind of interaction that Strieber began to have with the Visitors as “relationship”; though of a kind that continued to feel decidedly one-sided for some time to come. And while the sheer ontological shock and discombobulation involved with these encounters continued to elicit a kind of primal terror in Strieber, he began, slowly but surely, to carve out a kind of mutuality in the experience, eventually even discerning that these Visitors weren’t coming to hurt him, but perhaps to ultimately help him.

Who were these Visitors? What was their intention? Why had they chosen him? And what did this mean not just for his future, but for the future of the human species? These are all questions that Strieber wrestled with in his engaging and thought-provoking book Transformation. And we’ll endeavor to do the same in this, the 36th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

For almost as long as human beings have been attempting to document and study what is often collectively termed “high strangeness”, it has been assumed that various phenomena should be studied separately, as distinct fields of inquiry. Thus, when researchers wanted to conduct research and/or look for evidence suggesting human consciousness could survive bodily death, they would do so by isolating factors only related to that particular inquiry.

And if, for instance, another group of researchers wanted to investigate the psychic and personality effects brought on by supposed contact with non-human intelligence, they would proceed by only considering factors related to that narrow field of study. It was assumed this was the best way to proceed, so as to tease out data that was already difficult to ascertain – because these kinds of phenomena tend not to be easily reproducible under laboratory conditions.

However, almost by accident, when data was compiled and looked at as a whole, it was discovered that various – presumably unrelated forms of high strangeness – seemed to correlate with each other somehow. That is to say, a person who’d experienced one form of high strangeness was much more likely than, say, a random person from the general population (what one might consider “the control group”) to have experienced other forms of “paranormal” phenomena as well.

Interestingly and tellingly, this curious and surprising result has persisted, even with rigorous controls in place to ensure other artifacts aren’t creeping in to corrupt the data. And, as a result, a new paradigm has emerged – one so new that we’re still really getting acquainted with questions around how one might study this apparent connection, and what the implications might be in terms of our framing of ultimate reality.

Sometimes, even beyond this astonishing correlation point in the data, these various anomalous phenomena manifest in the same single experience. That is to say, not only is person A more likely than a person from the general population to have experienced two or more seemingly distinct forms of high strangeness, but sometimes these paranormal effects are observed/experienced in the very same event!

One such example of this kind of mind-boggling event — reported on numerous occasions – by unrelated individuals, is an experience where contact with non-human, apparently alien intelligence, also involves contact and interaction with deceased individuals from that person’s life. Yes, indeed. People sometimes experience meeting the Others, as they’re often called, as well deceased loved ones, in the very same encounter.

This apparent point of convergence between what were previously assumed to be completely unrelated forms of anomalous phenomenology, is as mind-bendingly confounding as it is utterly fascinating. And of course, the exploration of interrelated modalities such as these is ideal fodder for a podcast just such as this!

An exploration of these kinds of encounters, as well as a consideration of the astonishing implications that arise as a result, are the topic of this, the 16th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.

For almost as long as human beings have been looking up and spotting strange aerial vehicles making astonishing maneuvers in our skies, people have been reporting a parallel experience that in most people’s minds, is even stranger. I speak of direct contact with the supposed intelligence controlling these advanced craft.

Sometimes the contact comes in the form of remote, telepathic communication – where human beings find themselves being communicated with by an apparently non-human intelligence not immediately present. Other times non-human entities seem to appear, in person as it were, wherever an experiencer is, making the event all the more concrete and ontologically disturbing.

Of course, the most — depending on your point of view — famous, or infamous, type of contact, is in the form most commonly referred to as “abduction”. This kind of event involves humans being taken — often reportedly against their will, and under a form of paralysis — and transported directly onboard UFOs — i.e. alien craft. The means of this transportation often involves bizarre elements such as levitation and the passing, seamlessly and effortlessly, through solid walls.

What is often termed “the Abduction Phenomenon” takes on an even stranger turn with the added consideration of an even more startling metric. Here I refer to the finding that many, if not most, of the people who have experienced such an event have come to realize, sometimes on their own, and sometimes with the aid of tools such as hypnotic regression, that these experiences are not isolated events, but actually part of a repeating pattern, often stretching well back into early childhood. Sometimes even a history stretching across generations of genetic lines emerge.

Even stranger than the revelation of this evidently alien intervention in the lives of reported thousands, if not millions, of people, right across the planet, is the reported nature of these contact events. These experiences are as utterly disorienting and paradigm-shattering as they can be ultimately illuminating and transformative. The sheer depth and richness of the experience has led author/experiencer, Whitley Strieber, to refer to the experience as “communion”. And, like Streiber, contactees/abductees are often left with artifacts, such as missing time and bodily implants, at the end of these uncannily bizarre episodes.

But make no mistake, while these experiences can ultimately play a deeply transformative role in the lives of experiencers, they are — perhaps of necessity, based on the reality-bending nature of the information being conveyed — also ontologically shocking, and often — at least initially — astoundingly traumatic. Perhaps there is no easy way to ease a human being into these kinds of revelations. They effectively pull the rug out from underneath a person, even if, what’s eventually put in its place, for many anyway, is something much richer and more inspiring.

To complicate matters further, the expanded understanding of both self-identity, and reality itself, often discovered in these visits to the realm of the Others, even brings into question our somewhat limited understanding as to the nature of free will, when a soul may have made participatory decisions about the nature of these interactions, even before birth into a human body.

The dual nature of these contact experiences: that are as soul-shakingly bewildering as they are ultimately illuminating and potentially deeply transformative, is the topic of this, the 14th episode of the Point of Convergence podcast.