Herbert Schirmer 2 (engl.)

[Jan-H. Raabe]

Jenny Randles:
"the Ufo conspiracy: the first forty years"
Blandford Press, London 1987
(this paperback edition by Javelin Books, London 1988)
p.65
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Chapter 10
The End of an Era - 1967

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There is no sensible alternative to the utterly shocking
hypothesis that UFOs are extrarerrestrial probes ...
(Dr James McDonald, atmospheric physicist,
University of Arizona, 22 April 1967.)
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On 3 December 1967 Nebraska patrolman Herbert Schirmer had a
close encounter of the fourth kind. Such things did not exist
prior to the Betty and Barney Hill story. Now we use this term
for any case where the witness claims not just to have seen a
UFO, or its occupants, but also to be taken on board: an
abduction!

The Schirmer case was particularly important, not only because
a policeman makes an unusually convincing witness, but also
because it took place whilst the University of Colorado was
mid-way into its funded UFO project. It was a natural for their
investigation. Here was something far more interesting than a
light in the sky. A credible witness claimed he had come face to
face with aliens. It had to require the most rigorous
investigation.

In fact the Condon report spends just two pages on this case,
and it is not that easy finding it. The heading merely says
'Case 42 - North Central: Fall 1967'.

Schirmer was a well-respected police officer, serving Ashland
and its cattle ranching plains. He had been a US Marine and
subsequently became the youngest man to rise to head of the
town's police department. This was after the sighting. So his
judgement was evidently not questioned by his superiors. Indeed,
his commanding officer at the time of the Colorado University
enquiry told the scientists (as they publish in their report)
that Schirmer was ''dependable and truthful'' and that he was
personally ''convinced [the officer's] report ... was not the
result of hallucination or dishonesty''.

The patrolman had been on duty since 5 pm and was nearing the
end of his shift. He was cruising around deserted roads on the
edge of town because some cattle had been bawling and acting up
and he wanted to make sure they were not creating any more
trouble. He looked at his watch at 2.30 am, as he approached an
intersection. Then, ahead of him, he saw red lights which he
assumed were hazard warnings on a truck that had possibly broken
down. Going to investigate, he was astonished to find that this
headlights illuminated an oval object that was definitely not a
truck !

The UFO-hovered a few feet over the road, and the red light
came from a row of small windows. Craning his neck out of the
patrol car Schirmer watched as it emitted a screeching sound and
climbed upwards (swaying from side to side at first). When it
had gone he probed around the area with his flashlight for a few
moments but, finding nothing, drove straight to the station. He
arrived at 3 am and entered a note into the log book. ''Saw a
flying saucer at junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or
not !''

He was not that well upon return, but did not make a fuss and
went home without doing more than file this note. He had
discovered a puzzle about the time, being certain that from
first seeing the UFO (at 2.30 am) to his arrival back in Ashland
was a maximum of ten minutes. Yet when he reached the station it
was 3 am. He could not account for the missing twenty minutes.
This factor only emerged when, after Ashland police released the
story, the Colorado University team came to see hirn. Schirmer
had certainly not made a big thing out of it.

The scientists who came were sufficiently impressed to invite
him to the project headquarters at Boulder, a beautiful mountain
city. Here he was to be subjected to an enormous battery of
psychological tests - including the Rorschach (ink-blot),
word-association and various personality profiles. Dr Leo
Sprinkle, a psychologist from the University of Wyoming, was
also flown in by the Condon team to perform hypnosis, after
these other experiments, in an attempt to unlock the memory of
the missing time.

The hypnosis did produce a memory. Inexplicably, the Colorado
University report does not discuss it or the results of the
various psychological tests. It merely comments: ''new
information was added to the trooper's account'' ! A summary of
this new information is available thanks to the hypnotist, Dr
Leo Sprinkle.

A force apparently emitted by the hovering UFO 'towed'
Schirmer's car up a slight incline towards it, having cut out
the engines and lights in the same manner as at Levelland. Two
entities got out and one projected a green glow all over the car
from a 'box' that it carried. In a sort of trance Schirmer found
himself getting out of his vehicle.

One of the figures stood right next to the policeman. The
description will sound somewhat familiar already. The face was
ashen grey, with a high forehead, and cat-like eyes. No hair was
visible on the face, but the body was covered in a tight-fitting
one-piece suit that had a balaclava helmet on top. The mouth was
only a slit and when the alien 'spoke' it used a deep tone, slow
and ponderous, which seemed to come without being spoken, as if
telepathlcally transmitted.

''Are you the watchman of this town ?'' the police officer was
asked. Schirmer replied that he was. He was then led up onto a
catwalk that ringed the UFO and finally inside it. Here a circle
of 'drums' spun around, giving off multiple colours. The entity
explained that this was a power source which used 'reversible
electrical-magnetism' (words that meant nothing to the witness).

Both abductor and abductee then 'floated' up a sort of
gravity-free elevator shaft to another level where Schirmer was
shown a 'vision' (possibly, although the concept would be
unknown to Schirmer in 1967, a hologram). This 'vision' was like
a projected image of a sun with six planets. The alien alleged
that they had come from another galaxy and were watching earth
closely. They had landed to obtain some electricity from a power
cable. Before being taken back to his car Schirmer was told,
''Watchman - you, yourself, will see the universe as I have seen
it.'' It was added, however, that he would only remember viewing
the UFO from the outside.

After this memory had been triggered by hypnosis, the
policeman was sure it had happened. Sprinkle advised the
Colorado study for their report, ''The trooper believed in the
reality of the events he described.'' It was not in his field to
say whether they could have occurred. Nevertheless, the Wyoming
doctor was so impressed by all this that he spent the next
twenty years investigating similar cases and is now one of the
world's leading experts on the close encounter of the fourth
kind. In 1980 he summarised his view, ''In my opinion the
present evidence for UFO phenomena indicates (tentatively) that
the earth is the object of a survey by intelligent beings from
some other civilisation.''

The Condon team seem to have been remarkably unimpressed by
all of this one-sided support for the witness. They even noted
that Schirmer had voluntarily asked to take a lie-detector test
and that this ''showed no indications that the UFO report was
other than truthful''.

So, why was such a tiny amount of space devoted to this major
case, when dozens of pages in the report are given over to
complex mathematical calculations about radar and atmospheric
optics ? They allege that the site showed no trace of radiation
and thus concluded that there was no proof that ''an unusual
object had landed on or hovered over [there]''. A real cop-out,
if you pardon the pun !

Although they have never published any material to support
their conclusion, and all that is summarised in the report
itself totally refutes it, the final Condon Project counts this
case as explained, because there was ''no confidence that the
trooper's reported UFO experience was physically real''.