On the night of December 3, 1967, a young police officer in Ashland, Nebraska named Herbert Schirmer saw an alien spaceship and met with aliens in it. This encounter is one of the most discussed UFO cases among ufologists. It was around 2:30 a.m., and 22-year-old Herb Schirmer was driving his patrol car along U.S. Highway 6 toward Nebraska 63. Suddenly, he felt something unusual and got disoriented. Sometime before, at around 1 a.m. and 1:35 a.m., he had checked the local barn and found the cattle behaving strangely.
At around 2.30 a.m., Schirmer crossed Highway 6 after checking on some facilities and reached its intersection with Highway 63. He noticed some strange red lights on his right, hovering over the ground.
Schirmer assumed that it was just a truck, so he passed the intersection, drove his car to the object, stopped at 40 feet, and switched on his cruiser’s headlights. He was totally amazed to see that the object was nothing like a truck. It was shining brightly and had a metallic body. The policeman also noticed that the blinking lights were coming from the saucer’s window.
In a report, he later wrote: “At 2:30 a.m. On December 3, 1967, I saw a UFO at the junction of (U.S. Highway) 6 and (Nebraska Highway) 63. Believe it or not.”
He described the object to be oval-shaped, 20 feet wide, and 15 feet tall. He also said that when he approached the UFO, it rose to 50 feet off the ground, emitted a loud beep sound, suddenly shot a light beam to the ground and vanished in the sky.
At that moment, Schirmer thought his encounter with the alien spacecraft was over. But when he returned to his station, it was 3 a.m., so he lost 20 minutes between the spacecraft’s disappearance and returning to his station.
When he got home, Schirmer went to bed but could not fall asleep because of a severe headache. He found a red scar under his left ear.
Schirmer used to make notes in his log, and he wrote down everything about his UFO encounter.
As soon as the news hit the media, Schirmer’s phone was flooded with prank calls. One man called him and said he was from Mars. Once, he was flagged down by a local tire shop owner who said: “Herb, if you ever see another flying saucer, and it lands, you tell them (aliens) I want to sell ’em a set of tires.”
Schirmer joined the US navy at the age of 17 and also served in the Vietnam war although he had never supported the war. After the navy, he decided to join law enforcement.
The policeman struggled to remember what had happened to him in the 20 minutes following the UFO encounter. After several months in 1968, a psychologist from the University of Wyoming, Dr. Leo Sprinkle conducted a hypnosis session with him, during which it was possible to partially restore information erased from his memory. Those hypnotic sessions were conducted by the Condon Committee, a University of Colorado project, funded by the U.S. Air Force.
Schirmer said that the engine of his car stalled and the radio turned off. He saw something white, and a fuzzy figure that resembled a man came out of the spacecraft and approached his police cruiser.
The alien being prodded him with some device and said: “Are you the watchman of this town?”
Schirmer replied, “Yes, sir,” and then the alien asked him to go with him.
The alien took him into his spacecraft which was full of lights, cables, and various instruments. The policeman met several aliens onboard who were smaller in size. They told him that there were other flying objects of the same kind, flying in the atmosphere of our planet.
He also said that aliens had bases in the United States, but they themselves came from the nearest galaxy and stayed on Venus for a while. The aliens said their propulsion system was based on reverse electromagnetism, and Earth was their energy source. Their goal was to prevent humanity from destroying the Earth.
After further investigation, which included hypnotic regression, Sprinkle, worried about a perceived bias on his part, wrote:
“The writer [Sprinkle] believes that there is sufficient empirical evidence to support the views that the following phenomena exist: hypnotic processes or varying levels of awareness; extra sensory perception and psychokenetic (sic) processes (ESP or psi processes); and spacecraft (“flying saucers”) from extraterrestrial sources which are controlled by intelligent beings who seem to be conducting an intensive survey of the earth.
Because these views are different from those of many persons in contemporary society, the writer [Sprinkle] offers his impressions with the recognition that other observers may have obtained different, and even conflicting, impressions of the interview with Sgt. Schmirer.”
The Condon Committee unanimously dismissed Schirmer’s message as sheer delusion and hallucination. Dr. Sprinkle had a different opinion but could not convince them. The state of mind of his patient was not brilliant.
“Evaluation of psychological assessment tests, the lack of any evidence, and interviews with the patrolman, left project staff with no confidence that the trooper’s reported UFO experience was physically real,” Condon Committee concluded.
