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Crown Books
By David Glück
Posted on: 4/17/2002
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Does this bookseller actually believe this stuff?
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 About a year ago I decided to browse the local Crown Book store while my wife shopped for clothes next door. I first rifled through the science and nature section looking for something new or interesting. Finding not much for me, I moved over to non-fiction. What I found there horrified me. It still chills me as I write about it now. A big-headed, bug-eyed alien was staring out at me from the cover of a book called Communion: A True Story. It is not a new book. It’s been out for years. It has even been made into a movie. A tale of alien abduction by Whitley Strieber who claims in the book to have been repeatedly kidnapped and probed both physically (in the most unlikely of places) and mentally, then deposited back home to have bad dreams and little memory of what had happened to him. He was a tortured man until a hypnotherapist helped him to remember his ordeal. What makes this book non-fiction and not just another scary story in the science fiction section? Only the claim by the author that it is a true story. That’s about it…
I complained to a clerk. She agreed that it shouldn’t be in non-fiction but it was a corporate decision. “We are told where to put the books,” she said.
(By the way, Strieber also writes horror books. He wrote The Wolfen. To the best of my knowledge, he makes no claim that it is a true story.)
Last March, thirty-eight people in Rancho Santa Fe, California bought themselves new black Nikes, ate some bad applesauce, and shed their containers to meet and enter an alien space craft to be whisked off to the Kingdom of God. An alien spacecraft was, according to Whitley Strieber on a national radio show, tracking the Hale-Bopp Comet. Whitley Strieber, as you know, wrote a true story about alien abduction. It’s in the non-fiction section at Crown Books. He can be trusted.
As appealing as the idea may be, there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that we are being visited by beings from other worlds. Having said that, I invite the reader to visit our list of some of the more popular claims, disciplines, ideas, myths and fantasies that have been presented as facts but have no supporting evidence, or worse, have been shown to be false. Some of the people who make these claims would like would like nothing better then to part you from some of your money. (Go ahead, call the psychic hot line now!) Some are just silly. Many of their claims have caused real harm to people.
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