Herbert Schirmer Abduction, Ashland, Nebraska

Ashland is a small town in Saunders County, Nebraska, about 25 miles southwest of Omaha. In December 1967 its police department had a 22-year-old sergeant named Herbert Schirmer. Early on December 3, at about 1:00 and 1:35 a.m., he noticed cattle at a sale barn behaving strangely.

At about 2:30 a.m. he reached the junction of U.S. Highway 6 and Nebraska Highway 63. Red lights were blinking ahead. He took them for a truck and stopped his patrol car, headlights on high beam.

The lights, he said, were shining from the windows of a saucer-shaped object. It hovered 6 to 8 feet above the highway, about 40 feet ahead, tilted at roughly 15 degrees. A row of oval portholes ran around its edge, each about two feet across. Through them he saw a black line moving up and down. There was a cat-walk around the object, whose surface looked like polished aluminum.

Then it glowed brilliantly. It began to rise with a siren-like sound, fluttering sideways and emitting a flame-colored material from its underside. Schirmer leaned out of the open car door and watched it move nearly overhead. Then it shot upward and out of sight.

He believed the whole thing lasted about ten minutes. His watch said about thirty had passed. He reached the station at 3:00 a.m. feeling strange, weak, sick and nervous. Later accounts add a red welt below his left ear, headaches and a buzzing in his ears.

Schirmer asked for a polygraph. Chief Bill Wlaschin arranged one, and according to the chief it showed no sign of deception. The Condon Committee sent Roy Craig and John Ahrens to Ashland on December 11 and 12, 1967. They found a small chip whose main constituents were iron and silicon, possibly ordinary scrap. They found no unusual radioactivity.

Ahrens returned on December 19 to administer psychological tests. On February 13, 1968, psychologist R. Leo Sprinkle hypnotised Schirmer in Boulder. Schirmer spoke of being "in communication with someone in the object" but held back. The report disguised him as "a state trooper" and left staff with "no confidence that the trooper's reported UFO experience was physically real."

On June 8, 1968, hypnotist Loring G. Williams held a second session, arranged by Warren Smith with Brad Steiger involved. Now the missing time filled in: a greenish gas surrounded the car, and a bright flash paralysed him. He was walked up a ladder into a cold interior for a briefing. The beings were "four and a half to five feet tall," grey-white, with slit mouths, unblinking slanted eyes and "a winged serpent on the chest." They claimed bases in the United States and off the coast of Florida.

Kevin Randle later argued that Smith "made things up to pad a story," that hypnosis invites confabulation, and that the Condon file recorded troubling sleep problems. Randle also noted, following Martin Kottmeyer, that Schirmer's alien sketch resembled the aliens of Mars Needs Women. Milton Brener saw support in parallels with the propulsion details of Alfred Burtoo's 1983 account. No formal hoax finding exists.

Schirmer was promoted to police chief, then resigned about two months later, citing trouble concentrating and public ridicule. He is reported to have died in 2017. His story, often set beside Betty and Barney Hill, lives on in podcasts, in Michael Jasorka's graphic novel December 3, 1967: An Alien Encounter, and even in a Nebraska IPA.