Quick Take
- Narration: Whitley Strieber narrates his own work, giving the material an intimacy and authority that a third-party reader could not replicate, this is a man describing decades of personal research and the experiences of people he knows.
- Themes: close encounter testimony, human-visitor communication, government concealment and public policy
- Mood: Unsettling and speculative, earnest without being credulous
- Verdict: For listeners already engaged with UAP and close encounter phenomena, Strieber’s analytical framework here is more rigorous than most of the genre; skeptics will remain unconvinced but may find the witness testimony more affecting than expected.
I want to be upfront about where I stand with this material before I describe what Whitley Strieber does with it. I approach UFO and close encounter literature with genuine skepticism and genuine curiosity simultaneously, a combination that is, I think, actually the right stance for engaging with a subject where the evidence is genuinely contested and the testimonies are often disturbing regardless of what you believe about their origin. I came to Them expecting either a credulous true-believer text or a careful phenomenological study. It turned out to be something closer to the latter.
Strieber is most famous for Communion, his 1987 account of his own alleged encounter, which remains one of the defining documents of modern UFO literature whether you believe it or not. Them is a different kind of project. Rather than returning primarily to his own experiences, Strieber analyzes the accounts of eleven close encounter witnesses and attempts to derive from their testimony a coherent picture of what these visitors might intend. He is not interested in proving the encounters happened. He is interested in what the pattern of testimonies reveals, if taken seriously as data.
The Analytical Framework Strieber Builds
The first part of the book is where Strieber does his most careful work. Going through eleven accounts systematically, looking for patterns in what witnesses report, not just what they saw but what was communicated to them, what physical and psychological effects followed, what the encounters seemed designed to accomplish, Strieber constructs what he calls the first in-depth picture of visitor intentions. This is a bolder claim than it sounds. He is arguing that the encounters have a structure, that they are not random or purely psychological projections, and that this structure contains information if analyzed carefully.
Jacques Vallee, in the foreword, describes the book as building fact after fact toward a case for policy realignment. Mitch Horowitz places it alongside Vallee’s own Passport to Magonia as a significant interpretive work. These are not fringe endorsements, both Vallee and Horowitz are serious thinkers about the phenomenon, whatever their conclusions, and they suggest that Them is being received within a community of serious inquiry rather than popular sensationalism.
The Military Dimension and Government Silence
The second part of the book turns to military encounters, and this is where Strieber makes his most provocative claims. He argues that visitors have actively shaped government secrecy policy, that the concealment was not entirely a human decision but was in some sense enforced or encouraged by the visitors themselves. This is a contentious position even within UAP literature, and Strieber acknowledges the difficulty of substantiating it. What he offers is a framework for understanding why governments might have responded to what they encountered by choosing silence: not just bureaucratic inertia or military classification, but something more specific to the nature of what was experienced.
A reviewer who described themselves as having grown up with increasing awareness of how little we understand about this phenomenon noted the book’s honest inquiry into the possibilities as its primary virtue. That honesty is real. Strieber does not resolve the questions he raises. He maps them with more care than most writers in this space manage, which is its own kind of intellectual contribution regardless of your prior position on the material.
The Communication Problem Strieber Takes Seriously
The most philosophically interesting section of the book, for me, was Strieber’s exploration of the difficulties of communication between species with differently structured minds. This is not a new question in science fiction or in speculative philosophy, but Strieber’s framing grounds it in specific testimony: witnesses who report being communicated with in ways that are not linguistic, that bypass rational processing, that leave them changed without being able to fully articulate what was transmitted. What does it mean to communicate with an entity whose cognitive architecture may be fundamentally different from yours? Strieber takes this seriously as a real problem rather than a narrative device.
One reviewer described the book as thorough, thought-provoking, and beautifully written. I’d qualify the last part: Strieber is a trained novelist, and his prose is more careful than most non-fiction in this genre. The audiobook benefits from his own narration, which carries the weight of someone who has lived with these questions for thirty years rather than someone performing enthusiasm about them.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if you approach UAP and close encounter literature with genuine curiosity rather than settled certainty in either direction. Strieber is more analytical than credulous, and his insistence on examining the phenomenon for what it might mean rather than simply asserting what it is makes him a more interesting companion than most writers in this space.
Skip if you require conventional evidentiary standards before taking testimonial material seriously. Strieber is working with witness reports, not instrumental data, and he does not pretend otherwise. Also skip if you’re looking for entertainment, this is a serious, sometimes dense work of interpretation, not a narrative thriller.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to have read Communion or Strieber’s other books before listening to Them?
No prior reading is required. Strieber provides necessary context about his own background and prior work, and the analytical framework he builds in Them is designed to stand independently. Familiarity with Communion and his other work will give additional resonance to some passages, but it is not a prerequisite.
How does Them compare to Jacques Vallee’s approach to UAP literature?
Vallee himself writes the foreword and describes the book approvingly. Both Strieber and Vallee treat the encounter phenomenon as deserving serious analytical attention rather than dismissal or uncritical acceptance. Strieber is more focused on what the encounters mean for the individuals involved; Vallee’s work is typically more concerned with classifying and cataloguing the phenomenon’s characteristics. They are compatible rather than competing approaches.
Does Strieber address the US government’s recent UAP disclosure process and congressional hearings?
The audiobook was released in 2023, so some developments in government transparency on UAP that occurred after that date are not addressed. Strieber does discuss the history of military encounters and government concealment in depth, and his framework for understanding that history provides useful context for evaluating more recent official statements.
Is Them repetitive for readers who have already encountered Strieber’s witness accounts in his prior books?
Reviewers who have read Strieber’s entire body of work note some overlap with witness accounts published elsewhere. For listeners coming to Strieber for the first time, or who haven’t read all of his prior non-fiction, the testimonies will be unfamiliar. Strieber himself draws new observations from the accounts even where the accounts have appeared before, which mitigates the redundancy for those familiar with the material.
