Some old fashioned body-in-the-library research found this aged Popular Science article from January of 1953.  In it, the public is invited to help capture data for "the Air Force’s new project for studying saucers."  Although not explicitly named, the article dates from the time period of Project Bluebook, and it offers some interesting historical insights into the Air Force’s scientific methodology at the time.

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Dr. Robert I. (Irving) Sarbacher, circa 1946.

 
Having raised the question—after my earlier post on Whitley Strieber—about how Dr. Sarbacher actually died, and whether Whitley’s account of his death was accurate, I pursued the answer with single-minded determination.   I soon found out that the only claim in the public record about Sarbacher’s death appears to be the one given by Whitley Strieber in his book Breakthrough, hardback edition, Page 248:

Furthermore, Whitley thinks that by contacting Sarbacher he somehow caused Sarbacher’s death.  On his website, in response to questions rising among his own fans that started after my initial post of the apparent contradiction I found between Communion and Breakthrough, Whitley wrote:

(I was unable to link directly to the above post.  To find it you have to go here:  http://www.unknowncountry.com/board/index.phtml?winmain=main.  And from there you must click:  Whitley’s Books > Difference Between Communion and Breakthrough, and then scroll down to find it.)

Dr. Robert I. Sarbacher was born on 6 September, 1907, and died on 26 July, 1986, at 78 years old.  It should be noted that Whitley gave an accurate date for Sarbacher’s death.  He suffered no "confusion" about that date.

Dr. Sarbacher lived in Palm Beach, Florida, at the time of his death, and although Florida will release a death certificate to anyone who orders one, the state by law can only release a cause of death on a Florida death certificate to family members, which made finding someone who actually knew Dr. Sarbacher at the time of his death even more crucial to solve the mystery.

I don’t know how long I spent on this off and on.  A week?  Every promising beginning to a new clue had a disappointing end.  I discovered Sarbacher had a daughter and a son.  The daughter had changed her name while in her 30’s, which only made things more mysterious.  After a series of dead ends I had an idea which led to a clue, which led to more clues, which I followed to the online profile of another Robert Sarbacher whom the information I found suggested was Dr. Sarbacher’s son.

Dr. Sarbacher’s son, Robert.

I emailed Robert.  It took him a while, but he finally answered me, and I was right.  He was Dr. Robert I. Sarbacher’s son, and he didn’t mind answering some questions.  I asked Robert about how his father died.

Confirming a detail of Dr. Sarbacher’s health that Stanton Friedman had given to me in an email—that Sarbacher had emphysema when Stanton interviewed him in the 80’s—Dr. Robert Irving Sarbacher did not drown to death after falling off a yacht.

As Robert makes clear, his father died in a hospital, in his sleep, from a weakened heart caused by emphysema:

And how long had Dr. Sarbacher been hospitalized?

Whitley Strieber can now rest knowing that he was in no way responsible for Dr. Sarbacher’s death.  But while he is off one hook, he is on another.

Whitley Strieber was wrong about and utterly failed to confirm how Dr. Sarbacher died, which did not stop him from publishing and propagating—to this day—a false story about it anyway, along with his own unsubstantiated belief that Sarbacher died because he spoke to Whitley Strieber.  Whitley can claim that he believed his own tale, but that is a poor excuse to spread an untrue story which could have been confirmed or corrected before it was published with some effort equal to his own will to know.   Being the author of the false story, Whitley has been singularly responsible for his own salesmanship of it to a fan base who trusts whatever he says without question, and he has used the false story to enrich the mythos that has developed around him.

Have facts become so unimportant that unsupported beliefs now count as their equal?  Certainly, if people will believe you without them, why bother with exerting yourself to get them straight?

But though there was nothing remotely sinister about Dr. Sarbacher’s death, I did learn something interesting from Robert that it appears had not been known before, except maybe to Dr. Sarbacher’s immediate family.

Robert had a sense of his dad’s work and of it’s secrecy:

But what his dad could talk about, he did talk about at dinner parties, and to his son he gave a little something extra:

This story about Dr. Sarbacher’s work building missiles specifically to chase UFOs was something I had not heard before.  I emailed Stanton Friedman about it, and he hadn’t heard it before either.  So I naturally asked Robert to confirm that detail—that the missile project his father worked on was specifically tasked to track UFOs.

I asked Robert another question, as per a query from Stanton Friedman, but Robert had no idea either of the time frame when his father worked on this missile project, or of the kinds of rockets the project used to chase UFOs.

So.  One mystery goes away—another one takes its place.

Then I got down to Roswell.  Whitley Strieber mentions Roswell in the now dubiously held conversation he alleges he had with Dr. Sarbacher, still on Page 248 of the hardback edition of Breakthrough:

But while Robert could not confirm any of the Strieber story details from what his father told him, and indeed provides details that seem to differ from what Whitley Strieber has the doctor saying he did in Breakthrough, Dr. Sarbacher may still have had some encounter with the famed Roswell crash material.

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I was binge-reading the subject of UFOs and I eventually got around to the books of Whitley Strieber.

When I binge read, I completely read one book after another.  There may have been 15-20 books in the stack, and that’s why I call it a binge.  I had grouped Whitley’s books together, so that after Communion I immediately read Transformation, and after Transformation I immediately read Breakthrough.

I mention this because this pattern may be responsible for what I found; a small detail of Communion was still fresh in my mind when I met what should have been the same detail in Breakthrough.

From the 1987 hardback edition of Communion, beginning on page 226, Whitley writes:

Now here is the part you’ll want to pay attention to.  Right after the last sentence in the above quote Whitley writes:

The ostensible reason for Whitley to interview Sarbacher was the doctor’s letter to Steinman, the direct implication being that Whitley could not have interviewed Sarbacher because Whitley only became aware of Sarbacher through that letter, and by the time Whitley became aware of that letter, Sarbacher was already dead.

Fortunately, we don’t have to interpret the meaning.  Whitley makes any other meaning impossible on the next page, 228: 

Clearly, if Sarbacher died in July of 1986, and Whitley first became aware of both him and his letter in August of 1986, there was no way Whitley could have interviewed Sarbacher without the help of a medium.

Now let’s move forward to Breakthrough.  From the 1995 hardback edition, page 248, Whitley writes:

Whoah horsey.  And further on down the same page:

If Whitley had bothered to reread the relevant sections of Communion, he would have seen that this is not an issue of publishing “only quotes” from a letter, but an issue of later telling a different story that cannot be made consistent with the earlier version of the same story he told.  They cannot both be true.  One of the stories Whitley told was confabulated.

Does Whitley have notes made at the time to back up the enhanced version of the incident in question?  No.  The beginning of the last sentence in the above quote leads into this:

And there’s more.  The Communion version is mundane.  It’s just about Whitley discovering Sarbacher’s letter to Steinman, and Whitley talking to Greenwood about him, but the version told in Breakthrough has the cloak and dagger drama of an X Files episode.  Here is a longer clip of the section in which the above quotes appear:

Now that’s a story!

So which Whitley Strieber to believe?

Even granting that some inexplicable things have happened to Whitley, as it is reasonable and I am willing to do, they have happened to a man who confabulates. And so that I am not accused of charging Whitley with lying, or some other form of outright deception, here is a useful definition of what it means to confabulate:

"(v) confabulate (unconsciously replace fact with fantasy in one’s memory)"

And given that Whitley confabulates, how can anyone reliably sift fact from fantasy in his stories?

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