A Nebraska Patrolman Lost 20 Minutes in 1967 — The Being That Took Him Called Him the Watchman

#ufo #condonreport #missingtime A Nebraska Patrolman Lost 20 Minutes in 1967 — The Being That Took Him Called Him the Watchman At 2:30 in the morning on December 3rd, 1967, a 22-year-old patrolman in Ashland, Nebraska put his high beams on what he thought was a stopped truck. At 3:00 a.m. he wrote one line into the police log book: "Saw a flying saucer at the junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or not!" He could not account for roughly twenty minutes of that night — and everything anyone would ever know about those minutes, including the man himself, came from a single reel of recording tape. This is the case the federal Condon study filed as Case 42. The file holds his chief's word that he was dependable and truthful. It holds the polygraph he requested himself and passed. It holds the metal fragment analyzed as iron and silicon, the distance he misjudged by a factor of four, the full clinical test battery of 1968 — and one sentence that splits the whole case in half: "New information was added to the trooper's account of his UFO experience; however the authenticity of the reported experience remained unestablished." Under hypnosis, Herbert Schirmer described beings with gray-white skin in silver coveralls, a winged serpent on each chest, a craft that drew electricity from a power installation, and a question asked at his car window: are you the watchman of this town? When the session tape was played back to him, he did not recognize his own voice. He never recovered the night itself. He learned it, from the record. The town hanged him in effigy in the cemetery. His car was dynamited while he cooperated with a federal study. His wife left. He was made the youngest police chief in Nebraska and lasted two months. He stuck with the story for fifty years, and when he died in Georgia in 2017 — working, to the end, as a security guard — his obituary did not contain the word police, or Ashland, or UFO. The official study concluded it had no confidence that the experience was physically real. The record it kept is still on file. Sources shown and quoted in this film include the Condon Report (Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1968), Case 42; Herbert Schirmer's own recorded conference testimony; contemporaneous statements by Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle; and public records. On-screen depictions of the beings, the craft and reconstructed scenes are witness-sketch style illustrations and staged reconstructions of testimony, clearly presented as such; they are not photographs of the events described. Quotations from the Condon Report and named individuals are verbatim from the published record. #aliencontact #herbertschirmer #ashlandnebraska #condoncommittee #projectbluebook #ufodocumentary #missingtime #watchman #1967 #coldcase