Whitley Strieber - The Master of The Key

The Master of The Key

In the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1998, Strieber was allegedly visited in his Toronto hotel room by a mysterious but very ordinary-looking elderly Caucasian man who delivered an unsolicited lecture covering various subjects from spirituality to the environment. When queried the man airily suggested that he might be called "Michael" but Whitley has taken to referring to him as the "Master of the Key". Strieber first reported the visit in his online journal in 1998 and later gave a more complete account in his self-published book The Key (2001). Skeptics have pointed out that The Key and the 1998 journal entries give different (not contradictory but non-overlapping) accounts of what the man said. Strieber's mention of his personally-devised system of shorthand or abbreviated note-taking in an interview with George Knapp on June 19, 2011, might at least partially account for this apparent discrepancy as the author had to reconstruct the entire 45-minute conversation with his visitor from a series of barely-legible squiggles he discovered by his hotel bedside upon re-awakening from deep sleep much later that same morning. He also chose to emphasize different subjects or aspects of the exchange according to how he surmised they could best be assimilated by his readers. Strieber claims that the stranger in his room informed him that humans have an electron floating in front of their foreheads, and that that may indeed be their soul. He also claimed the stranger handed him a vial of unknown white liquid, instructed him to drink it, and he did.

Before publishing The Key Strieber co-authored, with Art Bell, The Coming Global Superstorm (1999), a book about the possibility of rapid and destructive climate change. He has said that it was based largely on things the Master of the Key had told him about the environment. The book served as the inspiration for the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Strieber later wrote a novelization of that movie.

Another recent book Strieber says was inspired by the teachings of the Master of the Key is the self-published The Path (2002) which deals with the symbolism of the Tarot of Marseilles.