The Secret School: Preparation for Contact

Communion #4

by Whitley Strieber

The author of Communion recounts a summer forty years ago that he spent attending a secret school in the woods near San Antonio, and how this experience prepared him for his encounters with extraterrestrials later in life. Reprint.

Genres: Paranormal, Nonfiction

268 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

American writer best known for his novels The Wolfen,The Hunger and Warday and for Communion, a non-fiction description of his experiences with apparent alien contact. He has recently made significant advances in understanding this phenomenon, and has published his new discoveries in Solving the Communion Enigma.

Strieber also co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm with Art Bell, which inspired the blockbuster film about sudden climate change, The Day After Tomorrow.

His book The Afterlife Revolution written with his deceased wife Anne, is a record of what is considered to be one of the most powerful instances of afterlife communication ever recorded.

Reviews

[Davin Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made perfect sense. Alot of us feel as if something occured in our lives over those years where memmory and life itself gave way to the feeling of finally understanding...yet unable to make sense or detail of it until later in life. This IS happening. " They" ARE real, and we are all participants of a reality in which change itself is as frequent as breathing. No longer is it simply " abduction", but willing participation in something bigger than what we once thought reality actually was. The "box" we claim to think outside of at times, was never really there. It's tim to wake up, and this book "can" help you do that.

[Leah M · Rating 4 out of 5]

How can one truely prepare for contact with Aliens?? I think it's something you have to except over time ,as the relization that this is happening.i commend Whitley Strieber for his bravery in writting his books on these and his experiences,it would help alot of people come to terms with their abductions and realize that they arent ....alone....

[Steven H · Rating 1 out of 5]

STRIEBER GOES “BEYOND” HIS PREVIOUS BOOKS, ENTERING THE “PROPHETIC”

Louis Whitley Strieber (born 1945) is an American writer originally known for his horror novels (e.g., ‘The Wolfen,’ ‘The Hunger’), but since his 1987 book ‘Communion,’ has become considered as a UFO ‘contactee.’ He continues to write both fiction and nonfiction.

He wrote in the first section of this 1997 book, “I was about thirteen when I first realized that there were major parts of my childhood that I could not remember. It was an upsetting discovery, and I remained disturbed about it until the summer of 1995, when I finally began to reclaim what proved to be some truly amazing memories… My life has taken some strange turns. The experiences that I have chronicled in my three books about the visitors… have made me question the nature not only of the mind, but of reality itself. My sanity has been at stake. I have denied the truth of my own experiences. I have decided on half a dozen answers ranging from alien contact to a new form of hallucination. Always, I sensed that those secret childhood nights held the key. It was as if something enormously important … was hidden back in those old shadows, and I just could not get to it.” (Pg. xvii-xviii)

He continues, “As it turns out, those memories are the most important thing I’ve ever known. Now that I am reasonably sure of their content, it chills me to think how close I’ve come at times to losing them. But I’ve… recaptured some of this lost knowledge. Although I think that I was in the secret school for most of my childhood, the memories I have recovered so far primarily involve my ninth summer… The nine lessons in this book illustrate one man’s journey out of the trap of ordinary life---and it is a trap, make no mistake… I have gained the sense that there exists a science of the soul---perhaps one that we have lost, or never really gained, and that these memories somehow reflect its secret workings… This is not a book of simple facts and straightforward claims. It is a mirror, intended to startle you into your own inner recognition.” (Pg. xxi)

He recounts “in 1985, I [was] at the … apartment of a scientific friends, John Gliedman, looking at the single most incredible thing I had ever seen. It was a photograph of a face… I regarded the image. It reminded me a little of the Sphinx, but there was something harder, more brutal, more primitive about this face… One thing was clear: this was not the face of somebody at peace… I noticed a mischievous smile on John’s face. ‘This is a joke,’ I said. ‘It’s a NASA photo. The face is on Mars.’ … I just couldn’t believe it… The worst part of it… was that I … REMEMBERED it!” (Pg. xxiv-xxv)

He records, “I had not thought about Mrs. Carter since I was a child… But, like the location of the school itself, it had not been a dream. She had been entirely real. Who was this woman? I decided to do some research… I came into contact with her son… who told me that she had been poet laureate of Texas from 1947 until 1949, an astronomer, and the wife of Judge H.C. Carter… Reading her collection of poetry… I found in it many uncanny connections to the ideas of the secret school… As well as being deeply religious, Aline Carter was a scientist. In [her son’s] words, ‘she wanted to show that science and religion weren’t at odds with one another.’ This, also, has been a major thrust of my own work.” (Pg. 26, 28)

He states, “My mysterious visitors once displayed an image to me that communicated their concept of time. They do not see the future ahead and the past behind. To them, the future is like a pool of water to their right, the past a block of ice to their left. The present is the force that fixes the potential that lies in the future, turning it into the ice of the past. They seek back into the past to melt, change, and re-create, then refreeze their history. Using this process, they can to an extent repair problems and imbalances in their present time. They can prophecy, but this does not involve predicting things that are absolutely inevitable. Rather, a prophecy is a warning. Its purpose is to identify dangerous future situations that are inevitable given present conditions, so that those conditions can be changed.” (Pg. 148-149)

He suggests, “So where are the remains of the ancient civilizations, where were its machines and its great structures, its vast, teeming cities, its writings? Actually, they may be all around us, unrecognized for their true significance. The world is littered with unexplained artifacts that archaeologists and paleontologists simply ignore, or dismiss without serious study because they cannot be explained by accepted theories. Among these ignored artifacts are cement cylinders found in New Caledonia… [which] have been roughly carbon-dated to 5,120-10,950 B.C. … What the cylinders might have been used for, or who made them, remains a complete mystery. There are dozens of similar mysteries… There are some very strange footprints that seem human that were found in a Cretaceous stone near Glen Rose, Texas, in a strata that also contains dinosaur footprints… There are also technological objects littering the past, and some of them are very hard to explain.” (Pg. 174-176)

He says, “The secret school is part of the process of revising reality---a clandestine meeting of minds struggling to restitch the fabric of the world. It is about getting free of time, remembering ourselves in all our truth. Who founded the secret school---this hidden gateway to the timeless larger mind that is our true self? Was it visitors from some other planet? If so why lavish all the attention on us? Or was it our own souls, or people from the past or the future, or some other meaning of reality altogether. They are not important questions to answer now. What is important to realize is that the secrete school was founded by the mind, and it lives in the mind… The secret school is in all of us and belongs to all of us. It is the process of ceasing to be afraid of ourselves and facing what we truly are, of acquiring and learning how to use the power of joy.” (Pg. 210-211)

He asserts, “I have been working with this now for weeks, and the best way to describe it would be to say that I have come back with a possible memory from the future… it’s the overall significance of the memories that I want to understand. They are a rushing mass of obscure images, punctuated by things that are very clear. And one of those things disturbs me greatly. As a matter of fact, it is the most disturbing thing that I have seen in a whole lifetime of visions, and it want its importance to be acknowledged. I have been scorned and derided for years, but time has proved an awful lot of my visionary output to be authentic. I think that the country would be foolish to ignore this… in this particular future, Washington D.C., is in ruins… it was suddenly and completely destroyed by an atomic bomb, and nobody knows who detonated it. At the time of this vision, the United States is not a republic. In fact, it’s in chaos. There are many things being done by companies that are now done by government… there is a very brutal, shrill group of religious leaders---who have made repressive laws that they want enforced.” (Pg. 235-236)

He continues, “The conspiracy is extensive, and it appears to me now that it is already under way. It succeeds essentially, because American intelligence is being blinded to it right now by a combination of bad planning and the presence of religious zealots… Whoever is doing this intends to bring the components of their bomb slowly into the Western world… If Washington were to suddenly cease to exist… this would be the effective end of this republic… There would be … no one to reestablish the structures that keep us free… I don’t think that a dictatorship would occur, at least not at first…. I cannot confirm that I walked in that future world… But that doesn’t really matter, in the sense that the commitment needed to completely change this particular part of the future is not a large one. I cannot offer a method of protecting Washington… All that needs to be done is that the governors of a majority of states, right now, enter into a general accord to appoint a new congress in the event that a catastrophe destroys the old.” (Pg. 237-239)

He says, “In religion, we are becoming to cease to care about the differences between faiths. We are beginning to see that God’s grace is extraordinarily abundant in this world---that people must actually work harder to avoid it than to receive it. It isn’t that all faiths are becoming one, but that they are all coming to seem as valid to each other as they probably always have been to God. Philosophically, science is fracturing… Questions like these are… freeing science from the bondage of its ole materialistic ideology.” (Pg. 244)

Strieber seems to be getting a bit more ‘far out’ with each successive book. Nevertheless, this book may interest those studying UFOs, ‘alien abductions,’ etc.

[Alexander Duncan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whitley Strieber is a writer of vivid and complex imaginings, and *The Secret School* is one of his most explicit attempts to explain where those imaginings began and what they might mean. The book centres on experiences he associates with his childhood in San Antonio, Texas, beginning in 1954, when he was nine years old. He presents these events as the hidden source of his later paranormal life, including the “visitor” experience of December 26, 1985, recounted in *Communion*. According to Strieber, he had no clear conscious memory of the childhood episodes until fragments began to emerge much later, partly through hypnosis.

The book is also a revealing portrait of Strieber’s early temperament. He depicts himself as excitable, curious, impulsive, and strongly drawn to ancient Egypt, astronomy, science fiction, and flying saucers. His childhood, as he remembers it, was marked by pranks, nocturnal excursions, and risky experiments. He describes sneaking out at night, entering neighbours’ homes, and undertaking amateur engineering projects, including an “anti-gravity” experiment that allegedly disrupted his parents’ electrical service. He also reports witnessing ball lightning and undergoing unusual visionary experiences.

The “secret school” of the title is described as a place near his childhood home. Strieber says that he, and apparently other children, were drawn there late at night to receive instruction near a local nunnery. At the time, he believed their teacher was an elderly nun. He later came to interpret the lessons as immersive experiences resembling virtual reality, although that terminology is necessarily retrospective. For many years, he thought the entire episode might have been imaginal. In 1995, however, during a photo shoot in the Olmos Basin—an area with significant ancient Indigenous archaeological and burial associations—he says he recognized a particular tree and a set of broken benches as the physical location of the remembered school.

Strieber’s central theme is that human beings may discover new capacities by changing their relationship to time. He argues that “freeing” oneself from ordinary temporal perception opens possibilities within the human mind and perhaps within human evolution itself. He connects this idea with time dilation, a concept known in physics through relativistic motion, and with experiences of “lost time,” altered duration, and apparent glimpses of future events. In the book, these anomalies are presented as signs that the boundaries of ordinary perception may be more flexible than commonly assumed.

The strength of the book lies less in its scientific argument than in Strieber’s attempt to create a coherent symbolic framework for experiences that he regards as both personal and transformative. A notable feature of that framework is its resemblance to the work of Aleister Crowley. Strieber’s account of ball lightning recalls a similar story told by Crowley, and both writers are interested in precession, vast historical epochs, and the emergence of new forms of consciousness.

Strieber also draws upon language and symbolism associated with Crowley’s doctrine of the Aeons. He emphasizes the figure of Horus and the transition toward the Age of Aquarius, understood as the complement of Leo, and associates this transition with large-scale changes in human civilization. Osiris, one of the earliest and most influential deities associated with death and renewed life, also becomes an important symbol of transformation.

Strieber proposes a specific chronology. He places the Age of Leo at approximately 10,450 BCE and projects the Age of Aquarius roughly 12,960 years later, around 2510 CE. At the same time, like Crowley, he suggests that the essential transition is already underway in the present age. He associates the twenty-first century with a period of spiritual and cultural transformation, and links this process with astronomical and astrological cycles, including a Neptune–Pluto pattern.

He also reports memories of previous lives, including an incarnation as a Greek slave in Rome around 50 BCE. He states that details of this experience were confirmed during a trip to Rome in 1968. Such passages are characteristic of Strieber’s method: a powerful impression, dream, memory, or recognition becomes the basis for a much larger metaphysical interpretation. The emotional force of the experience is rarely in doubt, but the line between memory, symbolic insight, and externally verifiable fact remains mysterious.

Strieber’s response to the so-called Face on Mars is also mysterious. The image was deeply important to him, and he suggests that it awakened memories or impressions of having encountered the site during his childhood experiences. Later, higher-resolution photographs showed the “face” to be an ordinary geological formation whose apparent features were largely the result of lighting and pareidolia.

From these materials, Strieber develops a larger account of human evolution. He argues that the coming of a “new age” will produce a convergence of science and religion, together with the emergence of capacities now classified as psychic or paranormal. He also predicts a collective ordeal involving political and economic collapse, followed by recovery and the rise of a more enlightened social order.

Within this framework, the “visitors” function as guiding intelligences. In this respect, they resemble Crowley’s “Secret Chiefs,” and Strieber’s “secret school” may be read, at least in principle, as a parallel to Crowley’s A∴A∴: a system of instruction, initiation, and contact with beings understood as more than ordinarily human. Both writers seek communion with what Crowley called “preterhuman intelligences,” although Strieber frames the encounter through the technological and extraterrestrial imagery of the late twentieth century.

There is also a personal similarity between the two men. Strieber describes himself as having been strongly drawn, even as a child, to causing confusion and disrupting expectations. This recalls Crowley’s own attraction to provocation, reversal, and the deliberate disturbance of conventional categories. In both cases, confusion is not merely a social nuisance but a possible instrument of revelation.

Late in the book, Strieber introduces a technological theme. Like R. Buckminster Fuller and, later, Ray Kurzweil, he anticipates an acceleration of technological capacity and the increasing “ephemeralization” of material systems. He also foresees developments resembling artificial intelligence, writing that “it will become possible for the human individual to process and store huge amounts of knowledge.”

As a reading experience, *The Secret School* is strongest when it remains close to concrete description: childhood scenes, eccentric obsessions, nocturnal adventures, and the attempt to locate a remembered experience within an actual landscape. Strieber is persuasive as a recorder of his own imaginative and emotional life, and the book provides an important origin story for his later work.

*The Secret School* is best approached as a work of autobiographical mythology: an account of how Strieber organized his memories, intuitions, fears, and imaginative experiences into a system of initiation, cosmic history, and personal destiny. Readers sympathetic to his worldview may find it deeply meaningful. More skeptical readers may still find it valuable as a candid and revealing map of one writer’s visionary world.

[Melissa Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as interesting as the others and a little harder to follow

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Regardless of how you feel about aliens and UFOs, this book raising some rather wonderful philosophical questions, along with interesting points of history.

[MrFuckTheSystem · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book brought me back to being a little kid filled with adventure and mystery ! It all makes more and more sense !

[Lindumusa Sihlali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the book a while back. well was interesting at the start and for most parts. he believes we can overcome our current the way we currently time. as we see time in leniar terms. he believes its possible to operate in and out of time. I like mostly the parts when he talks about time & time travel. I think its a good book, although ny end when he talks of the future it becomes clumsy& a junk. am glad I read the book all in all. he records his experiences and makes brief commentary on them,making reference to other sources and facts a... which I found to make for a holistic view into the whole story.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a departure from Strieber's previous books in that it covers the childhood experiences of one summer that he felt like prepared him for his experiences with the visitors. It was difficult for me to understand the meaning of the book though as it seems to be left ambiguous. It seems to have more to do with a vision for how the world can be or should be, alternate timelines, as far as we know a fictional civilization on Mars, and past live experiences. I have mixed feelings about the book. Perhaps this school was better left a secret.

[Alias Pending · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short: If you like Strieber, you'll appreciate this one, especially the predictions. If you don't, you won't like this one. If you don't know who he is, don't start here.
Short addendum: Probably would have been better firmly embedded in "fiction."

[Eric Amble · Rating 4 out of 5]

For some tastes, this book is one of WS' most engaging descriptions of the "provocative unknown". The voice conveys WS' personality and upbringing very well: autobiographical with the immediacy of extreme strangeness--and detachedness of humor--that avid readers of WS would expect.

[Cats Moulder's · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite Streiber books . A glimpse into his soul. Awesome.

[Lisy V · Rating 2 out of 5]

The books started good, but I lost interest as I continued reading...

[Liam]

read this a little while ago and cannot remember what it was like