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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 it-later at a uparty, people began regaling him with thelr own. sightings. “I tealized,"“Hopkins says, “that there was kind of. an pnder- ~ ground of pegple who had kept it to themselves.” eB ‘In 1915 he‘Wrote up an account of a mass sighting 4n New Jersey for The Village Voice. The piece was ‘reprinted in Cosmopolitan and suddenly Hopkins was a name to be reckoned with. He began collecting stories of people who had lost hours or days out of their lives to abductions. In 1981, it became his first book, “Missing Time.” And there'll be another after ‘‘Intruders," though he concedes that “you have to ipso facto be crazy" to believe in his thesis, “But If this is true, then it’s the biggest story there is." Gary Kinder agrees. His book, “Light Years’ (Atlantic Monthly Press, April), reexamines the notorious case of Eduard Meier, a Swiss laborer who in the late '70s convinced thousands that he was in constant contact with an amiable outfit from the Pleiades. Meier amassed hundreds of photographs of the aliens’ saucers, thousands of pages of notes on their science and moral lore (ostensibly conveyed to him by Semjase, a comely Pleiadean about 330 years old), and yards of film of UFO maneuvers. For months, fans, reporters and film crews flocked to hear the one-armed, self-educated Meier sermonize; no one, however, actually saw his mentors. Then, in 1980, it all came apart. Several UFOlogists, after more or less research, declared his photes bogus, his story a fraud. The case is “unadulterated hogwash,” says Walt Andrus from MUFON's Seguin, Tex., headquarters. “An absolute hoax,” says Sherman J. Larsen, director of the Center for UFO Studies in Glenview, Ill. Andrus and several other UFOlogists Were so worried that a resurrection of the case would open their pursuit to ridicule that — without reading the book — es while skeptics prepare counterattack: they implored the publisher to dump it. sie “I'm catching so much hell," says Kinder, 40, an Idaho: > lawyer-turmmed-writer who came across the subject while on the”: promo trail for his last book, “Victim,” the 1983 account of aly Utah murder. The original investigators in the Meler case (who . hold the copyright to much of the film, tape recordings and ~ other primary materials) were looking for someone to write a.n book on the subject. After seeing the films and photos in the ° fall of 1983, Kinder was hooked, an Three years, a modest advance and $30,000 in expenses later, ++ he has tumed up a number of name-brand scientists, technical ... experts and eyewitnesses who stipulate that Meler's films, .,. metal samples and recorded saucer sounds — whatever they -- are — are no simple hoax, (Research chemist Marcel Vogel, a - 27-year veteran of IBM and holder of numerous patents, «. examined a metal specimen Meier allegedly got from the.,; aliens. Though he wouldn't say it was extraterrestrial, he : confirmed that “with any technology that I know of, we could“: not achieve this on this planet.) By the end of the narrative,-; the colorful case becomes plausible, if not convincing, Though *:: “the truth of the Meier contacts will never be known," Kinder ‘** says, “I thought the field fascinating. There really is some- ~ thing flying around out there. I’m convinced of that.” . It’s still a minority opinion in the science establishment. *. Astronomer-exoblologist Carl Sagan, who regards the search “‘ for intelligent life in the universe as ‘exceedingly important,” aa thinks the odds against its landing here are, well, astronami- cal: Even assuming that: our galaxy contains 1 million” advanced civilizations, each one would have to send 10,000 . missions a year just to find us among the billions of possible “e venues.” , : ’ Philip Klass of Washington, contributing avionics editor of « Aviation Wee Space Technology, dean of UFO debunkers, . says he was expecting the spate of new books: “Since the mid-’60s, the UFO movement has grown so desperate to « sustain momentum that they have embraced such tales of « abduction.” . If such events actually happened, Klass wonders, “Why has " not a single one of them ever reported the abduction to the | FBI?” Moreover, ‘We Americans love to collect souvenirs. But «* not a single one of these 100 or 200 alleged abductees has ~ brought back a physical souvenir” or even the explanation of * a new sclentific fact, “There's not a single piece of physical ,, evidence." Strieber is worried that the new books will bring all sorts’” of nuts and kooks out of the woodwork — thus distracting attention from the few intriguingly unexplained cases he calls _ “true UFOs” or “TRUFOs.” The general public, he says, ‘isn't -- going to know what to make of it, since there are so many -~ hoaxes,” i The most recent Gallup Poll on the subject was taken in _ 1978. At that time, 57 percent said they believed UFOs were = rea] and 9 percent said they had personally seen something --~ they thought was a UFO, Last June, the National Science ., Foundation released the results of a nationwide survey that °* found that 43 percent of adults surveyed agreed that “it is = likely that some of the unidentified flying objects that have « been reported are really space vehicles from other civiliza- . tions." The NSF saw dismaying evidence of scientific {Ilitera- cy; book publishers may see a market. sg