Whitley Strieber and "Communion"
The account
A writer said he was taken from his cabin by large-eyed beings, the "visitors," and told the whole story in a bestseller.
What investigators found
Sleep researchers link accounts like his to sleep paralysis and to hallucinations that occur while falling asleep.
The story
On the night of December 26, 1985, horror writer Whitley Strieber was at his cabin in upstate New York when, he said, small beings took him outside. In 1987 he published "Communion," which topped the bestseller lists and was made into a film. Its cover, showing a gray face with enormous black eyes, cemented the image of the "grey" alien.
Strieber continues to report contact with the "visitors" to this day. Skeptics point out that he was a fiction writer and that his descriptions resemble sleep paralysis, when a person wakes up unable to move and sees figures in the room. His supporters note that other people reportedly witnessed phenomena at the cabin.