Them by Whitley Strieber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Whitley Strieber returns with another book about the entities he calls the visitors, and while Them is perhaps a bit unfocused and doesn’t tread much new ground, it does allow Strieber to test out some new theories on what the whole visitor experience may mean. The tone is also generally a bit gloomier than it’s been in the past, with less emphasis on the transformative parts of the experience and more placed on the darker aspects–abductions, violent confrontations with civilians and the military, and whether the intentions of the visitors are benign or more sinister.
On the latter, he at least assures the reader that they’re not probably not harvesting us for food, since reports of abductions have dropped off sharply in recent years and if we were a food source, they’d still be ordering take-out, so to speak.
Apart from one late chapter, this book does not cover his own experiences, except mentioning them where relevant to others he discusses.
The first half of the book consists of letters pulled from the 200,000+ Communion letters archive, with each followed up by an analysis. Each case is chosen to help illustrate a particular aspect of the visitor experience, and the overall impression one gets–if the assumption that everyone having these experiences is not simply experiencing these things in their minds–is that the visitors are not a monolithic entity with a single purpose, but rather an assortment of factions, some with more noble goals (help us evolve), others less so (using us as playthings).
A point Strieber drives at repeatedly, is that the visitors themselves are responsible for all the secrecy concerning their presence, and governments and their agencies have been compelled to play into this, creating a system of classification that has perhaps forever insured the full truth of what is happening will never be known. The tremendous amount of money the Pentagon spends that goes unaccounted for is no flight of fancy, and Strieber suggest it may be funding vast projects the public is utterly unaware of.
One of the more interesting aspects of the visitor experience that Strieber has talked about before is how it might relate to death, but while he brings it up multiple times here, he makes no further attempt to better explain or theorize on the connection, steering the reader toward other books of his, such as The Afterlife Revolution. Understandable, perhaps, but still disappointing.
The second part of the book mainly covers how the government and military have helped to cover up what is happening, then ends with a chilling chapter on how Strieber himself has been targeted recently for harassment, via hacking of his website, as well as intrusions into his home that compelled him to journey overseas to finish the book. It ends, as he notes so much of the visitor experience has, without any clear answers.
If you’ve read his other books on this topic, you won’t find a lot that is truly new here, but he still explores the subject in a way I find measured and compelling, never making bold claims about things he does not know, but neither standing back as a supposedly detached observer. As I’ve said before, if this is all an act, it is convincing enough to be indistinguishable from reality.
My biggest complaint is that the book never really pulls together in an overall narrative, it reads as more an overview on several broad aspects of the visitors, UAPs and government secrecy. But it covers these things well, and the book is an easy recommendation for anyone interested in the topic of the visitors or UAPs/UFOs.
(And yes, the title is a direct reference to the 1956 science fiction film about giant ants, Them.)
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