Treasure-Hunter Seeks Alamo's Buried Secrets -- Digging Begins After Metal Scan Confirms Psychic's Prediction

SAN ANTONIO, Texas - On the hallowed grounds of the Alamo, Frank Buschbacher is digging for gold.

For the past month, excavators have sifted through a hole carved out of the plaza floor, an unprecedented treasure hunt somewhat akin to burrowing for riches underneath the Vatican. If Buschbacher finds his bonanza, which he thinks was stashed down a well during the 1836 siege, he will have rewritten a chapter of Texas history and challenged one of the most guarded icons of American folklore.

"When I started out, the idea of digging a hole in front of the Alamo was like mom's underwear or something; it was sacrilegious to even talk about it," said Buschbacher, 46, a California adventurer. "All I knew is that I wanted that hole worse than anything in my life."

In a mystical twist that has made the excavation even more unlikely, Buschbacher credits his success to the psychic guidance of an elderly Mexican prophetess, who not only steered him to the spot where he is digging but also helped exorcise many of his own demons.

For all the talk of treasure, it is really the hunt for tranquillity that has driven this ex-Hells Angel and former marijuana farmer who lost his youth 25 years ago in the jungles of Vietnam. Whatever he may happen to find - and sophisticated electromagnetic equipment shows something metallic is buried there - Buschbacher has discovered his biggest prize might just be the wonderment of the pursuit.

"Treasure is not about rolling around in wealth, but going out to look for it," said Buschbacher, who would be required to hand over his booty to San Antonio officials.

That spirit has swept like a contagion across the city, drawing crowds to the chain-link fence that surrounds the 15-by-15-foot pit. Tourists snatch up samples of authentic Alamo soil being hawked for $3.25 a vial.

The producers of the TV program "Unsolved Mysteries" wait anxiously on standby, having paid $13,000 for the rights to film the first glitter - whether it's from Jim Bowie's lost fortune or a pile of Lone Star beer cans. Already archaeologists are ecstatic about an array of Native American artifacts, including remnants of an 18th-century barbecue pit, unearthed in the first days of the dig.

"When I first met Frank, I thought: `Oh, no, here comes a true soldier of fortune,' " said Ann Fears Crawford, a Texas historian and former director of the Alamo research library. "But I ended up admiring him tremendously. You can't help but get turned on. It's his search, his quest, his drive - and that's what history is all about."

In 1986, Buschbacher made a journey through Mexico with a treasure-hunting friend who boasted of knowing a spiritualist in the southwestern state of Colima. Buschbacher, whose mother died of cancer after supposedly being cured by a faith healer, was less than sympathetic. But the second he met Maria Ahumada de Gomez, he was floored.

You have killed eight men, she told him, picking the exact number he had felled as a machine-gunner in the Vietnam War: "Let go of your pain." As Buschbacher reeled, his companion shoved a map in front of Dona Maria and asked where she saw gold.

Without hesitation, Buschbacher said, the old woman pointed to San Antonio, then drew a crude diagram of the Alamo grounds, a place she claimed never to have been. She explained that she had once seen the diary of a Mexican officer, which spoke of gold coins pillaged from the Alamo battle. The bulk of the treasure, she said, still remained.

Armed only with her hand-drawn map, Buschbacher began a decade-long quest to recover the cache, a journey that put him on a collision course with the guardians of Texas' most cherished monument.

Excavations at the Alamo have been conducted before, but only when engineering problems already necessitated breaking ground - and always under the watchful eye of the site's politically powerful custodians, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

After getting virtually every bureaucratic door slammed in his face, Buschbacher realized he would have to assemble a more scholarly body of evidence.

Poring through documents at the Alamo library, he discovered stories about the lost treasure of the San Saba mines, a region Jim Bowie had traversed shortly before dying in the 13-day siege.

He also found maps indicating that wells once existed on the Alamo grounds, which led him to theorize that Bowie had ditched the loot down one of those shafts.

His biggest break came in 1992 when Buschbacher finally persuaded the Houston-based Earth Measurement Corp. to survey the plaza with high-tech instruments. Although Buschbacher insists that he knew it all along, the equipment revealed several underground anomalies and metallic deposits right where Dona Maria had predicted.

As the dig enters its second month, Buschbacher tries to cool his heels across the street in a bare-bones office, donated by the Texas Adventure Special Effects Theatre. He is anxious to break out the backhoe and burrow down at least 8 to 13 feet, which is where the anomalies are located. But the archaeologists are still in the 2- to 3-foot range, sifting through the dirt by hand. At this rate, the dig likely will go for weeks.

"It's become almost an obsession," Buschbacher said. "I can't think of doing anything else."