The Fourth Mind by Whitley Strieber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is the latest in the ongoing series of books Strieber started (in)famously with Communion in 1987 and it is, perhaps, the strangest.
The book is divided into two halves, the first is largely based on a series of posts on reddit describing the physiology of the visitors based on an alleged eyewitness report. Strieber expands on these entries with his own experience to extrapolate on various aspects of the visitor’s anatomy, abilities and so on. The entire set of reddit posts is also included in an appendix.
Drawing on what he and others have seen, Strieber speculates on how the visitors can perform seemingly impossible things, like levitation, telepathy and ignoring physics and gravity. He further goes on to explain the visitors may be “out of time” and that they are here to both observe and perhaps join with us, because we are still trapped in a mode where time is linear. A major part of the thesis Strieber elaborates on is how the visitors have evolved to a point where they exist outside conventional time in such a way that they essentially know everything that has happened or will happen–basically, a life where there are no surprises.
If that sounds like a bit of a bummer, Strieber agrees. He seems to feel the visitors are perhaps even envious of us and our more primitive minds and bodies, where life happens and we don’t always know what’s coming.
Strieber also brings up two ongoing threats to humanity–the crisis of climate change, and the still-possible risk of nuclear war, and edges closer to thinking the visitors will intervene in some way if things get too dire for us (this seems especially timely for 2025, given what a dumpster fire the year is already becoming for the world).
The second half of the book is full of weird speculation about…us! Specifically, Strieber tries to draw examples from both ancient and more recent history to put forward the idea that humans had many of the same abilities of the visitors, like levitation and telepathy, but lost the abilities thanks to global cataclysms thousands of years ago (ice ages, along with other calamities, like fires that consumed large swathes of North America, and more) that forced people to prioritize survival over establishing cities and civilization. This shift to basic survival led to a kind of mass amnesia where these abilities were forgotten. He suggests it is possible for us to re-learn these abilities, and may indeed need to if we are to integrate the visitors into our lives without feeling inferior to them (to help with that, Strieber also suggests they are not necessarily all that much more intelligent than we are, which feels a bit like a burn on them).
The evidence presented throughout is circumstantial, though to his credit, Strieber does provide numerous examples of megalithic structures built to a scale and level of precision that would challenge us even with modern technology. For example, Ggantija on the island of Malta, has stones up to 5 meters high and weighing up to 50 tonnes–with no obvious means of how they would have been transported to the site. Strieber suggests it was, quite literally, levitation, which would have been a common ability of people at the time.
I’ve always approached Strieber’s books as being sincere–I don’t think he’s pulling some long con on readers–and that he truly believes everything he writes about. His tone in The Fourth Mind remains calm and sober as he discusses things that are pretty wacky, really. In trying to piece together a “grand vision” for both the visitors and humanity, it feels like he is making greater leaps than before. It’s all certainly food for thought if you have an open mind, and Strieber’s smooth, articulate writing makes reading such speculation effortless.
If you’ve enjoyed his other books, you will likely find this shorter entry worthy of your time as well. If you are disinclined to believe any of this stuff, there’s nothing in this book that will win you over.
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