Now let’s apply this sense of the archetypal to the story of alien abduction found in Whitley Strieber’s Communion. In the book Strieber, a novelist, recounts memories of having been abducted in October and December, 1985, memories which would later be more fully recovered by hypnosis. We might first be inclined to look at Strieber’s story as just that, that is, a story he invented for personal or commercial reasons, but a reading of the book dispels such suspicions. The story does not appear like one Strieber made up, but rather, an account of powerful and frightening events that engulfed him, events that brought with them the uncanny atmosphere that Jung spoke of, but here it is thicker and more disturbing. Strieber was awakened by a noise in the middle of the night while staying with his wife and young son at their country cabin. Instead of investigating it, he settled back in bed, an inappropriate response that would be “repeated many times.”27 He noticed a 31⁄2 foot figure in the doorway, which then rushed at him. It was wearing a smooth, rounded hat, but had no discernable face, and two dark holes for eyes. On its chest was “the visible third of a square plate etched with concentric circles.”28 Strieber later remembered being taken from the room in a state of paralysis, and ending up in a small depression in the woods. There to his left he saw out of the corner of his eye someone whom he felt was a female in a grey-tan body suit. Later he described her as a little person made out of leather,29 and this person was somehow familiar to him. He discovered subsequently that other people who had had similar experiences had felt that the visitor was familiar to them, and usually perceived it “to be of the opposite sex.”30 In this encounter Strieber entered into a state of profound fear, and his personality seemed to disappear. The strange creatures did experiments on him. The next day he awoke in his bed with the memory of having seen a barn owl staring in the bedroom window during the night.31 But there were no tracks on the roof in the freshly-fallen snow, nor, we may presume, any tracks outside showing the signs of his being carried off by the aliens.