I looked into the child's eves. He did not look haunted to me, that boy just flirting with puberty. In May of that year my younger brother had been born. and the house was consequently in upheaval. only some of it pleasant. I spent much time in my room reading.
That summer I read Life on the Mississippi and it was also the summer of my discover, of'
Kafka. One afternoon I found my mother reading The Metamorphosis. After that I read The Trial. I'd go down to the San Antonio Public Library on the bus and, sit in the big reading room under the fan and read Kafka until the librarian started getting uneasy, then I'd shift to Robert Benchley for the balance of the afternoon.
My smiling face hid a person full of conflicts, trying to cope with the sudden presence of an infant to an established home and discovering under the sheets at night that the sins the older boys whispered about were real, and were they ever sins!
I was deeply conflicted about my Catholicism, wondering whether the tenets of my faith could be fitted to the picture I was forming of the world. I asked why the pope hadn't saved the Jews from Hitler. I asked why the Church had burned people at the stake, and what on earth did abstaining from meat on Friday have to do with getting to heaven? And if the worst punishment in hell was to get a glimpse of heaven and not get to go, then what about the nuns in Limbo who were there caring for the unbaptized babies the angels didn't want to bother with? They'd had more than a glimpse of heaven. They'd been there for a while. So wasn't sending them to Limbo actually sending them to the depths of a personal hell?
The pope closed Limbo before we worked that one out in catechism class, unfortunately.
Still, my faith was a burning fire in me. I loved Christ and Mary especially, and used to pray with great fervor whenever I was trapped into going to church. Then the priest would invariably say, "Go, the mass is ended," when there were still ten minutes left. But why?
At home I got hold of a book by George Gamow about relativity. Suddenly I understood how the nuns could take Limbo. I understood why the mass did and didn't end at the same time. It was all relative. Einstein, in describing the physical universe, had also described the internal logic of the Church, enabling me to preserve my faith.
But when I brought up Einstein with my mother, she said, "We are Catholic. Catholics are absolutist." She and I would spend hours together sitting on the front-porch steps talking. We discussed everything from general relativity to the price of tennis shoes. I used to try to talk her out of her religiosity, but she was a Catholic intellectual in the heady days of the fifties, when the mass was still full of mystery and there were many fascinating and subtle potentials for sin.
My catechism class was asked to write essays proving the existence of God. Mine, an equation with an intentionally tautological argument, was declared to be a demonic inspiration. When confronted with this by the teacher, my mother said, "To think that children might be inspired by the devil is itself demonic inspiration." Those times were not more innocent than these, but they were less complex.
I do not recall thinking or talking at all about extraterrestrials. However, when I recently asked a friend of those days what was the strangest experience he could remember, I was surprised to find that his answer involved me. At the time I asked him the question, he had not in any way been exposed to this material.
Here is the story he recounted. When we were thirteen I apparently announced to him that "spacemen" had taught me how to build an antigravity machine, which I was constructing in my bedroom. This was in the summer of 1958. I do not remember the genesis of this machine, but I certainly remember building it. There was no magic to the thing; it was only an assembly of electromagnets taken from old motors. The supposed antigravity effect was based on a principle of counterrotation.
When I plugged my assemblage in, there was a great buzzing, the electromagnet to the core of the thing whirled madly. and the lights in the house began to pulsate. The whole thing whined and fluttered. There were showers of sparks. Parental cries of alarm rose from downstairs. As the machine destroyed itself the pulsation of the house lights became a dimming, until the bulbs glowed orange-red. Then they burst to blazing life, a good number of them blowing out in the process.
Finally I managed to pull the plug. Rather than tell my parents what had happened. I rushed downstairs and pretended ignorance. I did not need to pretend fright. The friend reports that I called him m great anxiety and said that I was afraid that the spacemen were mad because I had disturbed their power field.
I have subsequently discovered that there is a whole mythology of flying saucer technology, and a lot of it revolves around the concept of counterrotating magnets. One among the other people I have met who have remembered being taken tells an interesting story. He knows a man, another victim, who was given detailed instructions about how to build a motor of this sort. The man was given the instructions during an abduction experience during the fifties, and claims that he was told that he wouldn't remember a thing until 1985, when he suddenly found his mind full of richly detailed plans.
The exact sizes of the electromagnets and their distances from one another were explained, and there was much about the materials to used. Not having seen these plans, I cannot evaluate them other than to comment that the idea that counterrotating magnets of any kind would produce any unusual energies at all flies in the face of modern magnetic theory.
But he claims that when he built this device, all the metal objects in his barn were instantly pulled toward it and he was knocked out by a flying automobile engine The next day the barn burned to the ground in an unexplained fire.
It would be easier to believe in the truth of all these effects if superconducting coils were used instead of electromagnets. It is awfully hard to see where a field that powerful would be coming from, given our present understanding of magnetism.
I don't really think that details like the construction of a motor can be part of some shared hallucinatory system. Recall that I did not even remember my antigravity machine myself, but rather was told about it by a friend who remembered. My machine was built in 1958.
More than twenty years later this other man seems to have built a more exact version of the same thing, allegedly based on plans obtained in the same period.
The day after I built my device. I do remember being seized with a fierce urge to get away from the house. I went to my grandmother's country home with her, even though the occasion was one of her afternoon card parties.
About four the telephone at the country house rang. I can remember my grandmother saying, "House burned down? Mary Strieber's house burned down?" The blood just drained from me. Fortunately the entire house had not burned, only the roof over the wing containing my bedroom. The fire was never satisfactorily explained, although I have a feeling that it was related more to the effect a little boy's antigravity machine had on the wiring than to the hostility of annoyed visitors.
Fortunately for me, it never dawned .on my parents that I might have caused a disaster on this scale.
In July 1957 my father took my sister, who was then thirteen, and myself from San Antonio to Madison, Wisconsin, to see his sister and her family. We flew to Chicago and stayed at the Hilton, where I accidentally dropped a large milk shake out of a tenth-floor window. We spent the night at another hotel, and then traveled on to Madison to see the relatives. A week later we returned to San Antonio on the train.
All my life I have had a memory of that train, seen from above, rushing through the night.
Most of the windows are dark, which suggests that it is very late. There are thick pine woods, meaning that it must have been in Arkansas or farther north, for the Texas Eagle did not go through the pine forests of East Texas, but rather across the plains between Texarkana and Dallas and then south over rolling, featureless country.