Reinhold Schmidt and the Kearney Incident

November 1957. On the 3rd, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2, and a wave of saucer reports followed across America. At Levelland, Texas, witnesses reported cars stalling. Two days later, on Tuesday, 5 November, a grain buyer from Kenesaw, Nebraska, named Reinhold Schmidt was driving near Kearney, close to the Platte River.

His Buick's engine stalled. In a field sat a large, blimp-shaped object, a silvery craft some 100 feet long. The next day's newspapers called it cigar-shaped. Then a beam of light. Schmidt said he was briefly paralyzed by what looked like a flashlight. Two men left the object and escorted him inside.

There were six aboard. Four men and two women, completely human-looking. They spoke German. High German, Schmidt insisted, not Low German. They said they came from Saturn. For about thirty minutes they talked, and they wanted to know about the Soviet Sputnik launches and American satellite plans. Schmidt later added stranger touches: an ordinary terrestrial sports car for errands, and a supply of MJB brand coffee. Then the farewell. The ship ascended into the air, revealing large propellers at each end.

That same evening Schmidt went public by telephone, radio and television. He contacted the local sheriff and brought two local police officers to the site, where a greasy, greenish substance was observed. A deputy described green oil that smelled sweet, and imprint marks Schmidt said came from landing gear. The Kearney Hub investigated the site too.

Then the story began to come apart. Accounts of the footprints conflict, and one says only Schmidt's were found. The residue was matched to a can of green motor oil tied to Schmidt. Police learned he had served time in the Nebraska State Penitentiary for embezzlement in 1938. They held him overnight in jail, and he was sent to Hastings State Hospital for evaluation. Most residents laughed it off.

Schmidt blamed his hospital stay on a "Silence Control Group" out to discredit him. He published The Kearney Incident Up To Now in 1958 and lectured with fellow contactees Wayne Sulo Aho and John Otto. He claimed a second encounter near Elm Creek about a year later, and journeys aboard the spacecraft.

In Bakersfield, California, the story became a scheme. Schmidt took more than $30,000 from elderly women in his audiences, telling them the space people had shown him a mine of cancer-curing quartz crystals. The case reached court in 1961. A 27-year-old Carl Sagan testified for the prosecution that Saturn could not support life. Accounts of the sentence differ. One says one to ten years, another says ten.

Ufologists widely deem the Kearney incident a hoax, a contactee tale modelled on George Adamski's 1953 claims. Yet it never quite went away. It inspired the 1961 film Edge of Tomorrow. Sagan wrote about it in Intelligent Life in the Universe, and Jerome Clark is among the authors who have revisited it. No Project Blue Book record has been confirmed. In 2023, Nathan Tye drew on declassified Air Force files for a Kearney Public Library talk, "UFOs Over the Platte River." Schmidt himself died in Nebraska in 1974.