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.

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.

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