Skeptic Project

When I still was a CT, I believed heavily in Whitley Strieber, the horror novelist who wrote "Communion" and claimed he had been abducted by aliens and had basically a life-long involvement with contact from the "greys." The first "Communion" was actually pretty convincing, and in fact it wasn't until much later that I found out Strieber had portrayed himself in that book as a totally normal honest Joe when in fact he was a New Age whacko who was into tarot cards, astral projection, OBE's and Jungian pseudoscience decades before he claimed to have seen a UFO.

Strieber was actually pretty moderate in his first few books, until "Breakthrough" which came out in 1994 and he started to get into the Richard Hoagland face-on-Mars, Majestic-12, UFO technology crap that's now so familiar. What really did it for me is that in that particular book he claimed that an alien lived with him at his family's cabin in upstate New York for several months. The alien roommate slept on a hide-a-bed in the library and (ready for this?) would indicate which books he wanted Strieber to read by sucking hard candies and leaving the half-dissolved candy bits on the shelves in front of particular books. Strieber claimed he would finish eating the candies and read the books, invariably finding some great epiphany therein (Strieber's philosophy is a weird mix of New Age/UFO crap and traditional Catholic I-found-the-Virgin-Mary-in-a-piece-of-toast type mysticism).

Of course, if there really was an alien living in his library that was leaving little bits of candy lying around, any rational person would take the candies to a science lab to have them analyzed, because they would have alien DNA on them and could finally provide empirical proof of extraterrestrial life. But of course Strieber's "relationship" with his alien roommate was much too pure to permit something so vulgar.

What's the point of this topic? Two questions.
1. Anyone else read Strieber's books? What do you think?
2. In about 2000 or 01 Strieber wrote a book called "The Key" which was evidently so far out there that no publisher would take it, so it was self-published. In it he claimed that an alien had come to his hotel room in Toronto in 1998 and predicted all sorts of bad things that would soon happen in the world. I have no idea what those specific predictions were, but 12 years later I'm sure they'd be pretty amusing to debunk. Edward, if I was to find a copy of this hard-to-locate book and do a page on it, do you think it'd be worth adding to your Predictions page?

Strieber had an alien living with him? Sounds like American Dad.

"if I was to find a copy of this hard-to-locate book"

If money is no object, it's available from these sellers: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1117993132/ref=dp_olp_0?ie=UTF8&condition=all