On December 26, 1985, when he was forty years old, Whitley Strieber awoke as he was being carried out of his cabin in New York’s Hudson Valley to a tent in the surrounding woods, where he was beaten, poked, and prodded by unknown assailants. A circle of observers around him included giant insects and masked, trollish figures as well as an old friend—human—whom Strieber later learned had died several months earlier. In the years that followed, Strieber had more strange experiences with entities he came to call the “visitors”: One night, he found himself in flagrante delicto with an otherworldly lover. A year or two later, two mysterious beings implanted a small piece of metal in his ear. Over time he recalled events that had happened much earlier in his life: encounters with diminutive blue men, out-of-body experiences, and strange childhood episodes at Randolph Air Force Base, in his native San Antonio.

At least, this is what Strieber perceived happened to him, as recorded in his best-selling 1987 book, Communion, and several sequels. As a result, he became “the poster boy for alien abduction,” despite maintaining that he didn’t know exactly what had happened to him; after Communion’s publication Strieber received nearly half a million letters from readers describing their own close encounters. “My first books were unfortunate in one respect, in that they were so vividly written that readers and the media looked at them as descriptions of experience rather than descriptions of perception,” he says. “There’s a great deal of difference between the two.”

Though critics were often savage (the Los Angeles Times refused to place the first sequel to Communion on its nonfiction best-seller list; the book appeared on the fiction list instead), Strieber has stuck to his guns. This month he will release his thirty-sixth book, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, a collaboration with Rice University professor of religion Jeffrey Kripal that considers Strieber’s experiences through the lens of comparative religious study. Its chapters alternate between Strieber’s autobiographical accounts and Kripal’s examination of those reports using the tools of his discipline. Kripal, whose research interests include the mystical and paranormal, suggests that Strieber’s experiences with the “visitors” are not unlike St. Paul’s encounter on the road to Damascus or Moses’ interaction with the burning bush. If Strieber is telling the truth—and Kripal is convinced he is—his accounts might offer religious historians a modern case study of a perceived encounter with extraordinary beings.