Synopsis
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.