Communion: A True Story is the 1987 book in which Whitley Strieber, then known for horror novels such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, recounts experiences he says began at his cabin in upstate New York on the night of December 26, 1985. Published in New York by Beech Tree Books and later in paperback by Avon, it describes missing time, frightening flashbacks and encounters with small beings Strieber chose to call "the visitors" so as not to assume where they came from. He explored the memories under hypnosis after contacting the abduction researcher Budd Hopkins, who read them as an encounter with aliens.

The book was a nonfiction bestseller for six months in 1987, and its hardcover and paperback editions both reached number one on The New York Times nonfiction list, selling more than two million copies combined. Its cover, painted by Ted Seth Jacobs to Strieber's instructions, became one of the most widely recognized images of the grey alien. Philippe Mora directed a 1989 film from Strieber's own screenplay, with Christopher Walken as Strieber and Lindsay Crouse as his wife, Anne. New Line Cinema released it in November 1989; it earned about $1.9 million against a $7 million budget, and Strieber later complained that it showed the beings too clearly.

Critics doubted that the book described physical events. In UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1988), the skeptic Philip J. Klass argued that Strieber had too quickly dismissed the psychiatrist Donald Klein's suggestion of temporal lobe epilepsy; Klein found no sign of psychosis and judged epilepsy unlikely but not ruled out. The neurologist Steven Novella later tied the paralysis Strieber reported on waking to hypnagogia, which he called "a fairly common neurological phenomenon." When the Los Angeles Times book editor moved the 1988 sequel, Transformation, off its nonfiction list, Strieber called the decision "a reprehensible thing."

Communion stayed in circulation in 2026. Vice President JD Vance titled his June 2026 faith memoir Communion, and when he appeared with Joe Rogan, Rogan set Strieber's book beside Vance's and said he would have told him to choose a different title. Strieber discussed his experiences that summer on Weaponized and Area52, and in October Robert Bigelow and Garry Nolan talked about the book while comparing childhood memories of figures at the bedside. Nearly four decades after publication, Strieber was still being asked about the book, and its title was still familiar enough to make a vice president's faith memoir a talk-show joke.