When looking for interesting non-fiction books to read in an effort to improve my own journaling, I was excited to find Communion, a UFO book. It’s a combination of the author’s first hand events and transcriptions of hypnotherapy sessions, hoping to unearth more memories of those same events. It’s all over the place and unfortunately the described events aren’t actually that interesting. What is interesting to me is an established sci-fi and horror author (The Day After Tomorrow, The Wolfen) decided to risk his reputation and career to write this book, presenting his anal probing by alien lifeforms as fact! If this was Joe Nobody I could assume it was a ghost writer, but this guy is on the scene in NY in the 1980s! He’s known! He’s established! and he’s telling everyone some old lady alien jerked him off in front of dozens of little goblin janitors while they gently probed his anus. It’s kind of impressive! Beyond this, the meat of the book boils down to describing a lot of unexplained lights and shadows that move in and out of the confines of our reality. With the way the author talks about events as facts, they don’t really ask a lot of questions about why any of this happening. At one point I felt this was just an allegory for his marital problems and an excuse to get him and his wife into therapy.

As the book wraps up, he begins to try to link meaning of all of this to superstitions and ideologies of every religion to have ever been documented. But these connections are so quick and rapid fire that it feels more like a stream of consciousness. I’m mostly disappointed this did not turn out to be a thing that makes me feel magic of the world, once more. As we grow older we begin to lose our enchantment for the unexplained, well I did anyway. I KNOW magic isn’t real, I KNOW the odds of foreign life finding this planet are so infinitesimally small that it will not happen before the sun gives up and dies. But I still hope that I’ll see a ghost out of the corner of my eye, I hope that I will witness a miracle and I hoped that this book would make the hairs stand up on the back of neck while showing me that something bigger than ourselves exists.