"I get these messages from other planets. I’m apparently some kind of agent from another planet but I haven’t got my orders clearly decoded yet."
– William S. Burroughs
In 1989, the American author William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) wrote to Whitley Strieber, a writer previously best known for his successful horror fiction, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, about his alleged experiences of alien contact and abduction. In his first supposedly non-fiction book, Communion (1987), and its sequel Transformation (1988), Strieber asserts that he was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York on the evening of 26 December 1985 by non-human beings. Although the books are generally thought of as accounts of alien abduction, Strieber draws no conclusions about his alleged abductors nature, referring to them as “the visitors” – a name he chose to be as neutral as possible. Burroughs read both Strieber’s first two books on his experiences with the visitors, and wrote saying he would very much like to contact them.
Strieber’s wife, Anne, wrote back, saying they received a lot of crank letters and had to be sure he really was who he said he was. His next letter, in which Burroughs assured the Striebers, “I am indeed really me,” convinced them, and they invited him to spend the weekend at their cabin in upstate New York, where the experiences were alleged to have occurred.
Burroughs later said:
"I had a number of talks with Strieber about his experiences, and I was quite convinced that he was telling the truth. He told me this. ‘When you experience it, it is very definite, very physical, it’s not vague and it’s not like an hallucination, that they are there’."
For his part, Strieber said Burroughs was almost overly polite during his visit, but was clearly genuinely interested, and very curious about every detail of his experiences. Although the visitors he describes do travel in what appear to be ‘nuts-and-bolts’ physical craft, which manifest very much in the classic ‘flying saucer’ mode – and as for the beings themselves, roughly humanoid, mammalian beings, wearing at one point what appear to be blue overalls – Strieber himself had not ruled out the possibility they may not be extraterrestrials at all, but rather exist in his mind. Burroughs, himself no stranger to altered states, other realms of perception, and psychic manifestations, and a lifelong champion of Count Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics – which opposes the so-called “Aristotelian straitjacket” of either/or thinking – could certainly concur.
Regrettably, the visitors did not choose to manifest themselves when he was around, but he remained open-minded about the possible reasons for this:
"It may mean that it was not propitious for them to come and pick me up at that particular time. It may mean that they would contact me at a later date or it may mean that they regard me as the enemy… We have no way of knowing what their motives are. They may find that my intervention is hostile to their objectives. And their objectives may not be friendly at all."
Strieber referred to the visitors in his books also by the name “grays” – a meme which took on a life of its own, and has become very much the standard way of referring to at least one type of alien being that is apparently a regular visitor to our world: small, roughly humanoid, with a large, bald domed head, and usually large, black, wraparound eyes. This idea and image soon found its way into Burroughs’ own personal cosmology. He continued to be fascinated by them, and in a diary-entry for 3rd February 1997, written just five months before his death, and later published posthumously as part of Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, he wrote:
"The Grays apparently [are] Control Aliens, who have lost the ability to create, a dying race that needs blood and semen from humans. Bad folk those Grays.
I recall that Whitley Strieber was accused of working for the Grays… Why are abductions and contacts always to mediocre or inferior minds? Why don’t they come and see ME?
Because they don’t want to, are afraid to contact anyone with advanced spiritual awareness.
The Grays want to make people stupider. Anyone with real perception is a danger to them. A deadly danger..."
[...] He continued to be fascinated by them, and in a diary-entry for 3rd February 1997, written just five months before his death, and later published posthumously as part of Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, he wrote:
"The Grays apparently [are] Control Aliens, who have lost the ability to create, a dying race that needs blood and semen from humans. Bad folk those Grays. [...]
Here we are into gene editing and synthetic biology already, so of course it's incoherent: The old sci-fi trope of cellular-based, degenerate ETs that can technologically travel between the stars but perversely lack the ability to correct their own failing constitution and reproduction.
Which on top of that is secondary to their needing to be descended from humans and life on Earth for sample collections to even be relevant. If they were so incompetent at refurbishing themselves that they continued to need such over the course of decades and centuries. In the latter context, Burroughs was at least wise to not slot them as extraterrestrial in any conventional sense, especially in terms of lineage from abiogenetic origins on another world in the distant past.
The gods and creature myths of old seemed to come equipped with their own theogony and internal-story narratives concerning what they were about and up to, which were rich in mismatched and nonsensical elements as well. Not surprising if today's clinical-condition, substance induced, and anomalous/unexplained appararitions sport similar built-in accounts. In contrast, solipsism would feature the ultimate example of a coherent internal story... although, since there would never be exposure to standards beyond the dreamworld (oneirocosmos), the reasoned conviction that it internally made sense would be just another "inbred", self-affirming conclusion of the scheme's own guideposts that events were trapped in.
Nov 10, 2019 04:34 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 10, 2019 08:47 PM by Magical Realist.)
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