Whitley Strieber – Strieber, known for his book Communion (1987)
OH please... He is a fiction writer who wrote several fiction novels. Communion was a fiction book he is pretending is real.
“Strieber began his career as a novelist with the horror novels The Wolfen (1978) and The Hunger (1981), both of which were made into feature films, followed by the less successful horror novels Black Magic (1982)[5] and The Night Church (1983).[6]
Strieber then turned to speculative fiction with social conscience. Collaborating with James Kunetka, he wrote Warday (1984), about the dangers of limited nuclear warfare, and Nature’s End (1986),[7] a novel about environmental apocalypse. He independently authored Wolf of Shadows (1985),[8] a young adult novel set in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
In 1986, Strieber’s fantasy novel Catmagic was published with co-authorship credited to Jonathan Barry, who was billed as an aerospace industry consultant and a practicing witch.[9] In the 1987 paperback edition, Strieber states that Jonathan Barry is fictitious and that he is the sole author of Catmagic.”
Then he released “Communion”.
I met Whitley in Atlanta at a weird convention once. He gave a talk about this subject about 10 years after his book came out. Only a handful of people where present at the talk so he took time to meet everyone that wanted to chat with him. He seemed to be very sincere about his story.
Of course, there's no proof, so there's always the possibility he's lying. But there's also the possibility he's telling the truth.
As an aside, Whitley did meet with Dr. John Mack regarding the UFO phenomenon. He and Mack had extensive discussions regarding this subject and Mack spoke of it on several occasions, commenting that Strieber's experiences seemed as real as any of the people in Mack's research.
FWIW, Dr. Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical (who published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), had done a significant amount of clinical work on the abduction experience. In fact, Mack's work had to be defended against the Harvard Medical committee that sought to revoke his tenure because of his UFO work.
After an extremely careful examination of Mack's work (alleging his approach was unscientific and even harmful to the reputation of the Medical School), the committee agreed that Mack had more than met the school's academic, research, and treatment standards...and upheld his tenure.
In the tenure investigation, Mack was represented by Alan Dershowitz, who was a Harvard Law School professor at the time.
As Mack has said of the people in his abduction research group. These people honestly believe their stories. Does that mean that what they say happened actually happened? No.
It just means that they are telling the truth as they know it (or believe they know it).
Mack said Strieber falls in this group. Strieber believes what he is saying is the truth.