Them

By: Whitley Strieber

Narrated by: Whitley Strieber

Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

Them is the first book ever to examine the intent of the presence known as "aliens" or "visitors" from the perspective of what both civilian and military close encounter witnesses report happening to them.

Mitch Horowitz says in his preface that it's "among the most important interpretations of visitor phenomena since Jacques Valle's Passport to Magonia appeared in 1969."

Jacques Vallee, in the foreword, states that "This book cites fact after fact to build the case for in-depth realignment of public policy with public need."

In part one of the book, Whitley Strieber analyzes the experiences of eleven close encounter witnesses and from that derives the first in-depth picture of what this extremely strange experience may mean, and what our visitors' intentions may be.

In part two, he turns to the military experience, showing how the visitors themselves have forced governments to keep their reality secret, and what the effects of conflict with them has had on public policy as well as the lives of military personnel who have confronted them. Strieber also discusses why conflict situations occurred in the past and why this may be continuing.

He then explores the enormous difficulty of communication between species with differently structured brains, and how these issues can be recognized and addressed.There has never been a book written like Them. It is as much a first as Mr. Strieber's groundbreaking volume about his own close encounter, Communion. While, with the exception of a final, riveting chapter, it does not deal with his own experiences, in it he takes advantage of over three decades of study and research to create a vision of contact that may prove foundational to useful understanding of what is now a confused, sometimes violent, and fraught relationship.

Visit Whitley on his website, Unknowncountry.com and listen to his podcast Dreamland wherever you listen to podcasts.

©2023 Walker & Collier, Inc (P)2023 Walker & Collier, Inc

Loved this thoughtful consideration of the phenomenon

Whitley uses his own personal experience and the accounts of other to look at the abduction phenomenon from the perspective of the Visitors.
Interesting and thought provoking! Loved it.

Star Trek Was Never Like This

I’ve been a follower of Whitley Streiber for over 30 years. He makes regular reference to how his UIP stories are mocked, but I’ve always found his research to be sincere and well-researched. As a self-admitted skeptic of UFO stories of the past, it made his commitment to research all the more genuine.

Them is an excellent roll up of what he has published since the 1980’a in book form or his podcast, Dreamland. I’ve never seen the UFP topic of these specific creatures better than Them 👽.

I encourage to be open minded and just LISTEN to what Streiber says in these pages AND the thousands of contacted people that sent letters to Whitley and Anne about their experiences. You can’t just make this stuff up based on the unplanned common straits of the Visitor phenomena.

Star Trek always wraps up complex stories of First Contact too easily as an entertainment platform. If this story is our true First Contact then the entire process is a lot more complicated than others realize. Them will be an important research piece used by UFP scientists for decades.

Conflicted

I like listening to the stories people share, I don't really care for the analysis. I can do my own analysis, but I get why he wants to do it. He comes from a time where experiencers were treated pretty harsh, but these days it's way more acceptable and many platforms welcome us. Also, I just can't with his outdated views of climate change, overpopulation, etc. Many of the claims he makes about the world (views that come from the not so good guys) have been proven false. Stop blaming humanity for the wrongs in this world, we were born into this world that was and is clearly molded by people that think they know what's best for us. All you can do is work on you, and I think that's the moral of the story THEY are trying to teach us.

Whitley's brilliance never gets old

I loved listening to Whitley read this deep and moving book. While the topic isn't new, this particular slant on it makes me ever more curious. I likethathe doesn't give us "the answer," but wish he would say even more about what he knows for sure. Maybe next the!

Lacking dénouement. Dragging. Amateurish Production

I was looking forward to finally diving into Whitley’s story. And then it began.
Have you ever read a story that you knew could be amazing and as you read on and on you got the feeling the writer was trying too hard? What he was communicating was interesting (to an extent) though could have been so much more with less…

No doubt an interesting story was there to be told. However the author had spent too much time expounding on what would have been better with fewer words and so resolving into a more gripping story.

As a narrator, Whitneys voice is pleasant and easy to listen to.

However the production quality is beyond annoying frequently amateurish. I’m no specialist in audio recordings though the ups and downs, low volume to high when he starts and stops.

Secondly, there are many occasions where entire sentences or groups of sentences are repeated giving the audience a very amateurish impression. These problems could easily been rectified had the author listened to his own narration, or an editor had taken the time to do so would have easily detected and delivered the listeners the professional story they paid to receive.

This is really shameful of Audible and the writer and editor. The quality being more in line with a middle school production than the company that I first invested in nearly 30 years ago.

A Necessary Beautiful Crazy Mess of a Book

Just to get my criticisms out of the way, Them is a highly disorganized mess of a book. There is no reason that the two parts of it should be under the same cover. Yes they are both about the UFO phenomenon but aside from that the topics are really different and each deserves its own full-blown treatment. It would have been so great if the first part, which is about the Communion Letters, could have been expanded into a full book. I wanted more of that. And then, even on the chapter level there is a certain kind of random free association going on. One chapter will start off being about secrecy and then it somehow starts talking about ancient aliens and then the paranormal and so on. It can be kind of maddening, because even the digressions have digressions.

On the positive side: All of it is fascinating. Once I let go of the expectation that it follow whatever discursive model it is that I think the book should have followed, I was blown away by the depth and subtlety of Whitley's observations. You're just not going to get this kind of analysis from anyone else. And to hear it in his own voice just made it that much better. He has a way of making it feel like you're in the same room with him, that he's speaking to you personally. I binged on the whole thing.

All in all, in spite of its flaws, I think this is one of Whitley's best books in a long time.

The powerful connection

I could feel everything he spoke of by how he wrote and spoke it. I love the fact that he has gone through so much and yet puts sheds no blame and could be completely unbiased.

THEM: A Penetrating Inquiry into the Unknown

As comfortable as he is with fiction, Whitley Strieber also writes fact -- or what he would like us to believe is fact, for him! In "Them," he uses the framework of one of the best 1950's "giant insect" science-fiction movies to expose both his experiences, which include improbable coincidences and impossible sights, and his thoughts about the origins of these experiences, and the beings responsible for them,

In doing so, he reveals that by denying the existence of the Visitors (as Strieber, ever-wary of intellectual overlay, calls them) and forcing information about them underground, the Pentagon and the DoD have been doing exactly what the Vistors want, and expect them to do! Because the Visitors appear to communicate by telepathy, there are vast difficulties in understanding that go both ways. Thus, fanatical secrecy and denial by the government are characteristics of uncertainty and confusion, not some nefarious plot to keep us in the dark!

It's a tangled skein of threads, which is the metaphor Strieber uses to guide us through the Labyrinth, like Ariadne leading Theseus, to find the Minotaur of truth. He does this by referring to several of the thousands of letters that he and late wife Anne Strieber received after he published "Communion" in 1986, and analyzing the events described and their after-effects with hope of being able to properly interpret them. Those events are weird, and the point of Strieber's book is to take them at face value and find hidden messages, or clues, in the Visitors' behaviors. Apparently they are capable of staging elaborate set-ups of events over several days that gradually introduce one to realms of reality quite different from the consensus model!

Occasionally Strieber, in his efforts to imbue his theory with some kind of historicity, dredges up the specter of Von Daniken-esque events, and saffron-robed monks chanting the huge stones of the Great Pyramid into place (relax, Whitley, we have the receipt of a boat captain who ferried those blocks up the Nile and delivered them to the job site, a route which aliens probably would not have chosen, if their antigravity machines were working)! I recommend that if the reader finds this silly, as I did, you stuff it, as I did, and finish the book! Strieber displays an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the UFO encounters he's citing, and it's evident he's done deep, recent research into the physical, psychological and social sciences to buttress his case. He can be silly if he wants to! Remember, this is the writer who gave us a wolf sex scene in "The Wild!"

The scope and depth of this book is daring and challenging. It marks one of humanity's first tentative steps toward understanding an alien mind that, in its own clumsy, uncertain way, seems to be trying to reach out to us. It is, as Strieber rightly points out, a situation that affects every human on Earth, and one which urgently demands more attention than we are giving it! If you have any interest in the supernatural, UFO/UAP or abduction phenomenon, I highly recommend you read "Them."

In depth, Profound, Important read

Whitley works very hard at objectively presenting empirical evidence. His insights and advice going forward are important. Yes, it's scary and I believe he's sacrificed a lot to bring us this info. Grateful to you, Whitley.

More of the same

Not sure what to think about Whitley. His presence in the UFO/paranormal community is unparalleled, his writing is eloquent, and he reads his work well. It is interesting, but seems more like parable and religion to me than anything based in scientific evidence or fact. For this reason, I view it in more of a fictional context. If you liked his other books, you’ll probably like this one. If you are looking for a more concrete, evidential accounting of UFOs and alien contact, I would not recommend this book.