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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on

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Speaker 1: iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George

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Speaker 1: nor with you. We're talking to Whitley Strieber, who had

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Speaker 1: a nineteen eighty five event that got him to write

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Speaker 1: his book Communion, which he has republished, and we'll get

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Speaker 1: into that in a second. Whitley, So, after the doctor

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Speaker 1: ruled out any kind of medical complications or situation, at

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Speaker 1: what point did you realize you had a real et experience. Well,

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Speaker 1: my brother had sent me a book for Christmas called

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Speaker 1: Science and the UFOs, and I hadn't read it. I

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Speaker 1: had little interested in it, to be honest, but I

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Speaker 1: knew he had been he was interested in that subject,

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Speaker 1: and I picked it up more or less, I guess,

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Speaker 1: because I had, after all, had what appeared to be

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Speaker 1: in encounter with aliens, even though it didn't seem too likely,

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Speaker 1: and I read the book. I was reading through the book,

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Speaker 1: and to my horror and amazement, toward the end of

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Speaker 1: the book there was a description of something very like

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Speaker 1: what happened to me, and a researcher named Bud Hopkins

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Speaker 1: was mentioned one of the best. Yeah, and it turned

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Speaker 1: out he lived like about five blocks from us in Manhattan.

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Speaker 1: So and I well, let me. I went over to

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Speaker 1: see him by myself. I didn't go. I didn't take

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Speaker 1: Ann with me because I was afraid I was meeting

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Speaker 1: some kind of a kook. And she'd had already been

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Speaker 1: I mean around the block of this thing, and it

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Speaker 1: wasn't was very tense. So I tell him my story.

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Speaker 1: And he was obviously a very articulate and brilliant man.

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Speaker 1: He turned out to be a an important artist in

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Speaker 1: the abstract art community in New York, and you know,

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Speaker 1: and he was affable and open minded and basically a

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Speaker 1: good guy. And he knew what he was talking about too,

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Speaker 1: I mean he was he was. He was an efficient

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Speaker 1: researcher for sure. So I went home that day thinking,

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Speaker 1: what the hell am I going to tell Anne? Because

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Speaker 1: now I thought what seemed to happen is what did happen?

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Speaker 1: It had happened. And so I called a friend, Timothy Greenfield.

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Speaker 1: Saunders is an old friend, and I told him the story.

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Speaker 1: When I got home, I went straight into my office

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Speaker 1: and closed the bar, and I called Timothy and I

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Speaker 1: told him the story. And I said, I can't figure

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Speaker 1: out how to tell Anne did not exactly he said.

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Speaker 1: His reaction, He's been interviewed before about it was Whitley

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Speaker 1: clearly believed it. But oddly enough, his wife's parents had

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Speaker 1: had a sighting experience of these little gray beings in

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Speaker 1: their backyard at some point before this, and they lived

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Speaker 1: not even a mile, barely a mild from us, so

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Speaker 1: it was already something he was aware of, but not

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Speaker 1: like not the whole elaborate thing that had happened to me,

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Speaker 1: so he was not totally close to it. Levington it

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Speaker 1: that way. I did not know anything about the parents,

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Speaker 1: of course I was told that later. Anyway, he says

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Speaker 1: to me, just tell her she'll she'll she'll roll with it,

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Speaker 1: and I thought, I wonder if she will, because you know,

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Speaker 1: we've been fighting in so I took her. I said

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Speaker 1: to Annie, I said, listen to something we need to

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Speaker 1: talk about. And she was very upset because she thought

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Speaker 1: I was going to say something like we need to

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Speaker 1: consider a trial separation something like that. And of course

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Speaker 1: the love in our was very intense between us, so

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Speaker 1: it never stopped never it still has. I mean, you know,

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Speaker 1: you write a book with somebody after they passed away,

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Speaker 1: there's love there a lot of loss, right, So anyway,

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Speaker 1: I said, we sit down in the living room and

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Speaker 1: I tell her the story, and I say that basically,

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Speaker 1: I believe I have been taken a word of flying

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Speaker 1: saucer by the little man. And I expected her to say, well,

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Speaker 1: I do want to look for but instead she looks

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Speaker 1: at me for a second and she says, oh, thank god,

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Speaker 1: I thought you were going crazy? How about that? And

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Speaker 1: that was really when the rest of my life began

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Speaker 1: with not only with Annie, but just in general. Because

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Speaker 1: from that second on, Anne, who was really a very

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Speaker 1: very brilliant person and also extremely efficient. She could, you know,

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Speaker 1: she could accomplish things much more efficiently than I could.

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Speaker 1: And she she took the whole thing over. She started

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Speaker 1: studying it, she got books, she got went through my

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Speaker 1: story with me, inch by inch. But Hopkins introduced me

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Speaker 1: to doctor Donald Klein. Bud wanted to hypnotize me. But

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Speaker 1: I was not about to be hypnotized man an artist,

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Speaker 1: No matter how nice a guy he was, I didn't.

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Speaker 1: Sandy Depline was on the wall, so he gets me

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Speaker 1: not just a psychiatrist, but doctor Donald Klein, the head

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Speaker 1: of the New York States Department of psychiatry and one

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Speaker 1: of the world's leading forensic hypnotists, and people who started

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Speaker 1: spouting off that all hypnosis doesn't work and stuff after

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Speaker 1: the book came out, they were blowing smoke because doctor Klein,

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Speaker 1: at that point in his career, had solved over seventy

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Speaker 1: criminal cases by using forensic hypnosis, where he would enable

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Speaker 1: people to remember things like license plate numbers of hit

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Speaker 1: so you know, he was the real deal. And the

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Speaker 1: first hypnosis I did with him was absolutely terrifying because

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Speaker 1: it was about an incident that had happened in October

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Speaker 1: that i'd completely I didn't even know ad it was

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Speaker 1: buried in my memory and so when it happened, it

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Speaker 1: startled the hell out of me. And then the second

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Speaker 1: hypnosis was essentially the story I had already remembered, just

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Speaker 1: in more detail. And at some point either me or

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Speaker 1: End said we should, we should write this up. And

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Speaker 1: you were you were an author prior to that anyway, right, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I'd had books made into movies. The Wolf and The

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Speaker 1: Hunger had both been made into movies, and War Day

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Speaker 1: had been a big sensation, uh, worldwide author tour and everything.

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Speaker 1: So yeah, I was very definitely being an author was

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Speaker 1: my life. And you know, we were very innocent. Did

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Speaker 1: not realize two things. First, no one including Bud, had

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Speaker 1: any idea how many people this is actually affected. That

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Speaker 1: was number one. Number two, It didn't occur to us.

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Speaker 1: We thought of it as as an interesting story. It

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Speaker 1: didn't occur to us that there would be an active, organized,

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Speaker 1: social and cultural opposition to the very idea of telling

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Speaker 1: such a story. We did not know that because we

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Speaker 1: had no idea that under the surface, where you couldn't

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Speaker 1: see it, this was an extremely serious business. And the

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Speaker 1: US Air Force knew about the abductions and couldn't do

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Speaker 1: anything about them, and was engaged in the same cover

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Speaker 1: up then that it is now for that reason, basically,

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Speaker 1: and I think they were more widespread then than they

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Speaker 1: even are now. They've tapered off. They I can identify

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Speaker 1: the first abduction and seemed to start with a few

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Speaker 1: exceptions before. But they started in the earth in the

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Speaker 1: earnest in the late sixties, reached a peak in the seventies,

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Speaker 1: and then tapered off through the eighties. I was in

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Speaker 1: the last sort of cohort cohort of kind of waves

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Speaker 1: of abductions and continued to taper off into the nineties

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Speaker 1: until now they're not happening anymore. But you gotta understand,

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Speaker 1: if you look at what happens to people, what happened

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Speaker 1: to people, you're seeing something that makes a kind of sense.

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Speaker 1: They removed sexual material, They removed skin scrapings and things

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Speaker 1: they could get DNA from. They were extracting the essence

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Speaker 1: of mankind from our body. They were making highbred babies.

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Speaker 1: But that God knows. I mean, but they could have

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Speaker 1: all kinds of things they could have been doing. But

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Speaker 1: but they were certainly removing sexual material from people. And

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Speaker 1: I'll tell you I've I think I probably talked about

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Speaker 1: it on this show. We ended up having this very

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Speaker 1: strange child living in the woods behind our house. It

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Speaker 1: was I remember you saying that. Yeah, so I don't

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Speaker 1: know where he came from, but he's sure as hell.

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Speaker 1: Wasn't any normal child. And he could not speak. He

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Speaker 1: had He could only grunt, and when you got near

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Speaker 1: him you could hear his voice in your head. He

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Speaker 1: could clearly hear your thoughts. So that was no ordinary person.

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Speaker 1: That was a very very unusual person. And if there

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Speaker 1: if I don't know if he's an alien human hybrid

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Speaker 1: or someone who was doctored by them in some way,

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Speaker 1: but that was not an ordinary human being, and he

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Speaker 1: was an entirely physical person. How you write the book

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Speaker 1: Communion in nineteen eighty eight based on this experience? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and you were a well known author at the time.

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Speaker 1: Was it difficult for you to pitch that story? No?

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Speaker 1: I just wrote the book and gave it to my agent,

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Speaker 1: and off it went, and off he went, and the

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Speaker 1: couple of publishers turned it down, and then a couple

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Speaker 1: of publishers bid on it and it sold for a

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Speaker 1: lot of money. And you know, we were really happy

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Speaker 1: because and then of course the great movie came on

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Speaker 1: him and the movie came out. Yeah, but the thing is,

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Speaker 1: the book was the sensation, because you know, and how'd

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Speaker 1: you get the title Communion and came up with it?

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Speaker 1: I was going to call it body terror because it

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Speaker 1: had been such a physical experience and I felt a

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Speaker 1: sense of actual physical terror in my body, unlike anything

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Speaker 1: I'd ever known before. And she says, in the middle

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Speaker 1: of the night, there's a strange sort of low voice.

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Speaker 1: She says, Whitley, you shouldn't call it body terror. It's

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Speaker 1: about communion that you call it communion? And she was

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Speaker 1: sounded weird, and she seemed to be asleep when she

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Speaker 1: was talking. And I asked her about it the next morning,

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Speaker 1: and she said, well, at last we've come up with

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Speaker 1: a decent title. But she never said whether she was

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Speaker 1: awake or asleep, and that happened. So I figured, obviously,

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Speaker 1: for one way or another, we're going to call this communion,

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Speaker 1: and that's what we did. And after all these years,

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Speaker 1: you've decided to republish it. Tell me why, Well, I

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Speaker 1: have been observing the fact that since twenty seventeen a

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Speaker 1: lot of stuff has changed, and the government is clearly

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Speaker 1: gearing The Defense Appropriations Bill, it's just in the process

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Speaker 1: of being passed, has a lot of language in it

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Speaker 1: that's going to basically force the Pentagon to tell the

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Speaker 1: truth about this, even though they're they're kicking and screaming,

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Speaker 1: and they've got their heels dug in right now, for sure,

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Speaker 1: But they've gone so far as to admit to the

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Speaker 1: existence of these of the of the UFOs, the craft,

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Speaker 1: and that's a step in the right direction, because so

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Speaker 1: far no one has has really addressed the fact that

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Speaker 1: there is a bit of an elephant in this room.

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Speaker 1: The elephant in the room is us, of course, the

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Speaker 1: piece who've had the experience, because why would someone come

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Speaker 1: here across the vastness of space or however they got

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Speaker 1: here and just fly around. Come on, that's not what

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Speaker 1: it's about. Now. If it's not about us, we have

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Speaker 1: every right to be very disappointed and very concerned about ourselves,

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Speaker 1: because I think the truth is it's clearly about us.

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Speaker 1: That's what all the abductions were about. That's what all

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Speaker 1: the contacts are about this day, because you can get

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Speaker 1: people on this show right now who are in active contact,

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Speaker 1: and there's a lot of them. That guy John Martin

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Speaker 1: who films UFOs every night and I've seen a lot

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Speaker 1: of his footage is real. And Melinda Leslie and actually

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Speaker 1: take you out on a tour and you'll almost certainly

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Speaker 1: see them every night. So they're here. She's like a magnet.

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Speaker 1: She just knows what she's doing. Yea, Melinda knows exactly

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Speaker 1: what she's doing. She knows she you know, you tell.

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Speaker 1: She can glance up at the sky teller which which

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Speaker 1: moving light is a satellite, which one isn't. So that's happening.

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Speaker 1: It's there. They're they're here. Now, what are they doing? Here. Well,

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Speaker 1: that's and what do they want? I do know one thing.

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Speaker 1: They want our survival, and I'll tell you why. I

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Speaker 1: know that there is a consistent message among the close

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Speaker 1: encounter community that the planets in trouble. And I got

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Speaker 1: that message from them even before I knew they were

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Speaker 1: in my life. That's why I wrote a book called

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Speaker 1: Nature's End right after I published War Day. Listen to

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Speaker 1: more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern,

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Speaker 1: and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for

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Speaker 1: more