Books
Space Cadet
Meet San Antonian Whitley Strieber, best-selling author and alien abductee. The truth is out there, and he is too.
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Dressed in a conservative suit, his silver hair neatly trimmed, Strieber looked very much an ad executive, which he was back in the eighties at Cunningham and Walsh in New York. His voice had the sort of aggrieved, hectoring edge of someone who grabs you by the lapels to tell you about government conspiracies, but I was impressed by his apparent sincerity—he struck me more as a tormented soul than an out-and-out crank. I was intrigued when he talked about The Secret School and showed a clip from a TV documentary in which he actually rediscovered the spot in the Olmos Basin where he had attended his nocturnal lessons some forty years earlier.
A few weeks later, as I drove down Broadway in San Antonio, I had little trouble finding the upscale Terrell Hills neighborhood where Strieber grew up. The campus of Incarnate Word and the Olmos Basin were a couple of miles to the west. His mother, born Mary Drought, came from a prominent old San Antonio family. Strieber had spent his summers on the Drought family ranch near Comfort. His father, Karl, was a successful lawyer with interests in oil and gas. In an interview a few years ago for a book about horror fiction writers, Strieber described a traumatic childhood: The family home burned down, an uncle was murdered, and his father suffered from cancer of the larynx. (None of these events is described, however, in The Secret School.) According to what his mother told Ed Conroy, “Whitty” was an excitable boy prone to high fevers, falls from high places, and fits of crying. By his own account, he was a bright student, a rocket enthusiast, and a prankster. In The Secret School, he recalls sneaking into other people’s houses at night and leaving puzzling clues behind—rather like the aliens he would later describe.
One of those houses had a particular significance for Strieber, according to The Secret School. The rambling stone castle in downtown San Antonio belonged to former Texas poet laureate Aline Carter, who taught astronomy to children and let them peer at the stars through the telescope in her metalroofed observatory. Strieber’s recollection of Carter has a portentous quality; he finds himself wondering whether she had perhaps been the shadowy hooded figure who led more-cosmic classes in the secret school.
Strieber describes in detail the route he took at night on his bicycle from his home: down Broadway, across the San Antonio River, and over to the castle on Taylor Street. I followed the same route in my car and was startled as I drove across the Third Street bridge to see a small dome atop a big stone house—exactly as Strieber had written. Fortunately, Carter’s grandson Paul happened to be at the house when I arrived, and he graciously offered to show me the observatory. We climbed three narrow flights of stairs up to the roof, where I found that even the inscription on the revolving dome—“When I Consider Thy Heavens O Lord”—was just as Strieber had described it. Aline Carter, I learned, had been a well-known, rather eccentric figure who wore flowing white organdy robes and big hats. “My grandmother was very progressive,” Paul said. “If Einstein said something, she was on top of it. But she was also very religious.” He showed me a small chapel she had built inside the mansion—again, just as Strieber had described.
Later I spoke to Aline’s son David, who said that his mother had been “way ahead of her time” in trying to show “there was no conflict between science and religion.” When I asked him if he remembered Strieber, he replied, “The name is familiar,” and eventually he recalled a recent visit to the house from “someone who told me about his early sessions in the astronomy class.” Strieber, though, apparently hadn’t mentioned anything at the time about aliens. “I’d remember if he had,” David told me, “because I think anybody who’d say that is a nut. I hope he’s not insinuating my mother went along with him, chasing these fantasies. If he did say that, he misread her.” She was “too well grounded for that,” he said, though she “could really turn on your imagination. She had a line of bull that would intrigue you. The kids would stay spellbound with their eyes wide open.”
As Strieber reports in The Secret School, he was mysteriously spirited away from the Carter mansion one night for his first series of nocturnal lessons in the Olmos Basin, which Conroy’s book, Report on Communion, alleges is a hotbed of paranormal activity; Conroy says he found a number of other San Antonio residents who also describe anomalous events, strange encounters, and a sense of longing. Strieber writes that after age twelve, when he graduated from the secret school, he was spooked by the place and never returned until adulthood. (In an earlier book, however, he recalls taking girlfriends into the basin while in his teens, though he was never able to find the site of the “children’s circle.”)
Most of the basin is now covered by a golf course and soccer fields. As I drove around the neighboring residential streets, it was difficult to envision the wilder place that Strieber had once known, but I was able to narrow my search based on his accounts of entering the basin from Patterson Avenue. Parking my car on the Incarnate Word campus, I walked into the woods behind an outdoor swimming pool, and within about a hundred yards, I began to see details that appeared to fit Strieber’s description of his secret school. Down from the path leading into the woods was a dry creekbed. In the other direction were the fenced-in remains of a sort of grotto or quarry and the ruins of a small brick building. Poking up from the bushes were two large satellite dishes, which may or may not have been the property of a nearby luxury apartment building. I was surprised to find a group of large stones placed in a circle and the ashes of a recent campfire, whether the evidence of a wienie roast or a cabalistic circle, I couldn’t tell. (I later learned that the circle was recently set up by the faculty members.) Nearby was a pile of silvery cylindrical objects, which on closer examination turned out to be beer cans. (Obviously, students in the area still have their own nightly sessions pursuing forbidden subjects in the woods.) Around the bend was the fallen trunk of a huge, unusually gnarled oak tree. Later, as I walked back to my car, I even spotted a short, gnomelike being, who turned out to be a kid dressed up like an elf for a Christmas pageant taking place on campus that night. In the dead of night this place would have seemed eerie to any child.
A few days later I posted an anonymous question about the place I visited on the bulletin-board section of Strieber’s Web site, where he answers queries from his fans: Was it in fact the site of the secret school? Strieber eventually replied that the actual site had been destroyed a few weeks earlier—thus rendering moot any quest to find it. In response to another question, he wrote that since he had moved back to San Antonio, visits from his otherworldly companions had been few and all too brief. The sense of regret was almost tangible.
In my view the key to understanding Strieber is his statement in The Secret School that his work has been a way to flee from “the trap of ordinary life.” I can’t say that I blame him, really. An Olmos Basin full of magical spirits and the promise of infinite wisdom is far more interesting, after all, than a suburban golf course full of duffers and sand traps. As David Carter told me, “People love the mysterious. We love to get scared to death and have some Martian tap on the window. It makes good reading.”
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