"On the left side of his head was a small antenna. The skin on his face was of
a grey color. His nose was long and flat and his mouth was narrow and slit
like. His eyes looked like cat's eyes...
"Then he spoke, saying: Are you the watchman of this town? I said: Yes sir, I
am. He spoke again, saying: Watchman, come with me."
So began the UFO experience of Herb
Schirmer, now 30, who was a policeman, and later police chief, at the town of
Ashland, Nebraska. The date: Dec. 2, 1967.
It was not a pleasant experience,
especially after he wrote on his police log. "Saw a flying saucer at State
Junction 6 and 63. Believe it or not."
Some townspeople hanged Schirmer in
effigy as an expression that they didn't believe him. Tires were slashed and a
windshield broken on his car.
"I would give somebody a traffic
ticket and they would look at me and laugh, and tear up the ticket. What could
I do?, said Schirmer in an interview at his home in Point Roberts.
He didn't last long as police chief,
and quit. He has held other law enforcement jobs, including a job in a private
security force in Oregon. When word reached his employers of his UFO
experience, he was told to move on.
Despite ridicule, Schirmer has stuck
with his story since 1967, and feels he is ready to begin telling it to the
public.
"There might be a lot of people who
have similar experiences who are afraid to admit it," he said.
The UFO encounter was brief in
Schirmer's memory, but it was later found there was a 25-minute gap in his
radio log. U.S. Air Force investigators in Boulder, Colorado, interviewed
Schirmer and discovered he had no memory of events between the takeoff and
landing of the UFO. He was later hypnotized, and the memory of the 25 minutes
returned. He has since been hypnotized a number of times, mostly by a group of
UFO scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles. It was under
hypnosis that Schirmer drew scale diagrams of the interior of the space ship
he saw, and the grey-skinned being who spoke with him.
With friends, he has attempted to
duplicate the sounds the spacecraft made through the use of a sound
synthesizer. And he is putting his memories on tape at an inexpensive
homebuilt sound studio in Point Roberts.
In 1967 he was working the midnight
shift in the small town and a little after midnight noticed a bull had broken
loose from an auction barn. The patrolman got the bull back in the pen, and
then checked on two gas stations nearby.
"I made a radio check with Wahoo
Sheriff's office and informed them that all was secure," said Schirmer in a
report he wrote after the hypnotic sessions. "The time was 2:20 a.m. I pulled
on to State Highway 6 going west."
Then he saw the UFO, first as
flashing red lights, then as a football-shaped object.
He tried to call the sheriff's office
but his radio was dead. "The craft was moving over the highway north about 40
feet in the air. It seemed that some great force was pulling the patrol car up
the embankment towards where the craft was beginning to land."
Schirmer saw a red-orange glow on the
bottom of the craft, and saw a hatch open. "It was then that a shape of a man
came out and walked over to the front of the patrol car. Then a second man
came out of the craft and walked over to the car. The first man stood in front
of the patrol car and, holding a small box-like object, pressed something. A
green mist came out, spraying all over the patrol car. "The other man walked
over to the driver's side of the patrol car and reaching inside, pressed a
silver object against my neck, directly under my left ear. I felt a tingling
sensation go through my whole body."
It was then that the grey-skinned man
addressed Schirmer as "watchman of the town."
The grey-skinned man told Schirmer
how the craft operated, showed him the power source and computers, and
answered questions on the purpose of the craft's visit.
Among the answers: The craft landed
to extract power from a nearby hydro transmission line. 'He said: Look
watchman. And I saw a blue bolt of light. through a port hole. It was like a
beam and it hit the transformer on a power pole approximately 200 feet from
the craft. There was a bright flash of fire and the blue bolt came back to the
craft.
"Then the man said that one of the
reasons they landed was to extract electricity from power stations. He also
said that they have been observing us for a long time."
One of the men also told the patrolman that spacecraft would visit him again
twice in his lifetime. "If I were some kind of kook I would be saying that I
had a visit last week, but it isn't true. I never saw anything again."
Under hypnosis, Schirmer has drawn
detailed sketches of the power plant of the craft, which the spaceman said was
based on "reversible electromagnetism."
He saw a room circled with cannister-shaped
objects, with wires connecting them. In the middle of the room was an object,
glowing red, like a spinning football.
Schirmer said he was conveyed, by a
glass elevator, to another level of the craft and saw a TV-like screen which
the spaceman manipulated. He showed Schirmer what his own solar system "in a
galaxy next to yours," looked like, and saw pictures of the craft's mother
ship on the screen.
By the screen, he said, was a map of
a sun with six planets "with writing beside each planet. The language was one
that I could not read."
Schirmer says he is not a church-goer,
but looks to a Bible quote as a source of comfort that he is not going crazy.
It's from Ezekiel, Chap. 1.
"And I looked, and, behold, a
whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire enfolding itself,
and a brightness was about it ... out of the midst thereof came the likeness
of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness
of a man."
Schirmer saw four men and talked to
two of them, and hopes that others who have seen similar creatures will not be
afraid to talk about them.
HOMEPAGE
