733667-02-001-0037

OCR Text

UFO: Americans look to the ski | Continued from Page D-1 | (Warday,” “The Hunger,” “The Wolfen”) was the first out of the UFOlogical gate last month with “Communion” (Morrow). “ET.” it ain’t. The gruesome “true story” of how Strieber and his family were Tepeatedly tormented by creatures he calls The Visitors includes such delectable interludes as needles stuck into the brain (“What can we do,” a female alien inquires, “to help you stop screaming?"), a sort of anal rape with a metering device, a thin probe shoved through the nostril to the temporal lobe and other manifestations of what Strieber assumes is a form of interspecies research. With his son haunted by night terrors and his marriage crumbling, Strieber — hoping for mere madness — turned to neurology, psychiatry and hypnosis. Still the horrors persisted, obliging him finally to regard The Visitors as somehow real, even to find a grudging empathy for their purposes. He says he wasn't keen to write the book until he met several similarly afflicted persons through Budd Hopkins (a leading investigator of abduction claims and the author of another saucer-season volume, detailed below) and saw the “human suffering.” Publishers were equally reluctant: Of the 13 houses to which he submitted the manuscript, five “turned it down with contempt and a number rejected it as a favor to me — with the recommendation that I never ever publish it” lest his reputation be ruined. But four houses felt otherwise, and the bidding finally reached $1 million for hard-cover, softcover and other rights. It may have been a bargain: Sunday “Communion” hit the No, 7 spot on The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list. . Strieber, who says he has continued to have visitations since writing the story, is not too surprised by the success,' since “in December The Visitors told me they would help me with the book.” He's even founded a company to make a movie version. But what if the creatures should be displeased? “Well,” Strieber says, “if The Visitors are real and completely separate (from our own minds), and. I.were to sell this to somebody they didn't like, I'd be In more trouble than I can imagine.” After that: a book on how the experience affected his wife and 8-year-old son, It would be easy to dismiss Strieber as a guilt-sodden wacko who concocted his nightmare avengers from obsessive apoca- lyptic fears (‘Warday” and “Nature’s End” concem nuclear holocaust and environmental devastation, respectively) com- bined with remorse at his father’s death. And by his own account, he’s a bit odd: “I remember being terrified as a little boy by an appearance of Mr. Peanut.”’ But he preempts much criticism by his obstinate skepticism. Even after psychoanaly- sis, hypnotic therapy and a CAT scan found him sane and healthy, Strieber does not, finally, insist that The Visitors exist independently of his family's experience of them, and his book ends in a plea for further research. It can’t come too soon for the agonized subjects Budd : Hopkins describes in “Intruders” (Random House, April). Hopkins, a successful New York artist with works in the Corcoran and Hirshhom museums here, has spent the past 12 years studying 132 persons who claim to_have been abducted by allens, employing psychiatrists, psychologists and lie-detec- tor experts to screen his subjects. In “Intruders,” he recounts the experiences — often re vealed through hypnosis — of more than a dozen victims and their relatives. Despite wide divergence in region, age, sex and social class, the subjects share an alarming similarity: Mem- bers of the same family “seem to have been systematically abducted, at varying times and locations" for anatomical examination. There are accounts of sperm and ova ripped from their donors, tubes inserted and withdrawn while victims lie there like laboratory meat, babies artificially birthed and stolen. The stories are so alike in pattern and detail, writes Hopkins, 55, that they reveal “a central purpose behind” the abduction phenomenon" — namely, “a genetically focused study of particular bloodlines.” A hideous notion, “but I have the case material and I'm stuck with it.” The book's credibility chiefly depends on the assumption that so many people could not be lying in such eerily identical ways when they have nothing to gain except public humilia- tion. (And pain. Listening to his subjects, Hopkins says, “I'd match them tear for tear.”) He purposely withheld from the book certain of the victims’ key recollections (such as the allen writing they saw) as a benchmark for subsequent stories. Without physical evidence, he concedes, ‘There's no smok- ing gun. But we're gonna find it one of these days.” And face a saucerload of angry aliens whose cover is blown? “The weird thing is,"" says Hopkins, ‘I don't even think they care. ‘They work covertly according to their own pattern.” He first got interested in the subject in 1964. He thought he saw a. UFO on Cape Cod, and when he mentioned i…