Somewhere in the Skies - Abduction in Ashland: The Herbert Schirmer Story

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Ryan tells the incredible story of Herbert Schirmer. On December 3rd, 1967, Schirmer, a twenty-two-year-old police officer, was driving down a desolate highway in Ashland, Nebraska. He approached a pair of lights that he believed to be a stalled vehicle. When he got closer, he realized it wasn't a vehicle on the road, but a craft hovering in the night sky. After a few moments, the craft shot out of sight and the officer returned to his station, noting the sighting in his logbook. But for Schirmer, there seemed to be a period of missing time between when he first saw the object and when he left the area. And when he finally recalled what had happened in those missing moments, the story became far bigger and stranger than first imagined, prompting the Air Force and Government to investigate. Presented in association with the Omaha World-Herald and including actual audio from Schirmer himself, this is the story of the abduction in Ashland. Please take a moment to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple. Book Ryan on CAMEO at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/somewhereskies ByMeACoffee: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/UFxzyzHOaQ PayPal: [e-mail] Discord: https://discord.gg/NTkmuwyB4F Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/ryansprague.bsky.social Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomewhereSkies Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/somewhereskiespod/ Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Order Ryan’s new book: https://a.co/d/4KNQnM4 Order Ryan’s older book: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Store: http://tee.pub/lic/ULZAy7IY12U Read Ryan’s articles at: https://medium.com/@ryan-sprague51 Opening Theme Song by Septembryo Copyright © 2025 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Banking. Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host Ryan Sprague. Today's episode is directly inspired by an article written by Blake Ersk and published in the Omaha World Herald on April 4th, 2019. My sincere thanks goes out to the newspaper for their general. contributions to this episode.

The young patrolman took a drag from his cigarette, trying in vain to steady his nerves. Sitting in the small police station, mostly empty in the early morning, 22-year-old Herbert Shermer, felt feverish and disoriented. As he later recounted,

his body felt completely drained. His head buzzed and his thoughts raced. Did this really happen to me? He asked himself. As an officer, with the Ashland Police Department, Schumer said that he had been trained to take notes of incidents in his log, whatever they might be.

So there, in the early morning quiet, he grabbed a pen and scrawled a short message in his notebook, summarizing the night's bizarre events. At 2.30 a.m., December 3rd, 1967, I saw a UFO at the junction of USA Highway 6 and Nebraska Highway 63. Believe it or not. You are now somewhere in the skies with your host, Ryan Spray.

Herbert Shermer's gripping story of an alleged alien encounter would ignite a firestorm of news coverage, and he would become a legend among UFO enthusiasts. His tale of a spacecraft and its inhabitants, soon becoming ingrained in American folklore for decades to come. Schumer gave a rare presentation of his experience, recounting in detail what has to be. happened that night. The following audio clips throughout this episode are directly from that presentation. Shermer begins by giving us some detail about himself, setting us up for the amazing story we're about to hear. I was born in Missouri, and I was brought up as a service brat. My father was a career man in the Air Force. I went to school in Japan, Germany, France. French.

France and Hawaii. I jumped around quite a bit, so I didn't get much of an education when I was young, but I did finish it all later. When I was 17 years old, I went into the military service, the United States Navy, and my first news station was in Jacksonville, Florida. And then from there, I went to the Far West Command, and I helped serve our flag and fight for it and be a Vietnam, even though I felt it was an immoral act of a war. Then, coming out of the service, I went back to Missouri and spent a couple of months there. And I went home to Nebraska, where my folks were. And I wasn't making very much money being out of the service, you know, $2 an hour being a clerk, wasn't my bag, really. So I wanted newer fuels, so I always wanted.

to be in law enforcement. So I talked to my father about going into law enforcement, and he decided that the state patrol in Nebraska would be a good idea. So we fill out the farms and everything, and I had to go to the Ash in Nebraska, to the police department to get a police check. So I walked in, and five minutes later, I was a policeman. They hired me there. Shermer became an officer for the Ashland Police Department. On December 3rd, 1967, at approximately 2.30 a.m. After checking on two gas stations in the area, Shermer was driving his police cruiser along USA Highway 6 toward Nebraska.

As he continued down the road, he noticed something hovering, partly above the highway. At first glance, he thought maybe it could have been a truck broken down on the side of the road. But as he approached, it became quite close. clear this wasn't a truck's lights. It wasn't a truck at all or any conventional vehicle. It appeared to be a craft of some sort hovering in midair. As I got closer and put the high beams of the lights in the patrol car on this, this object started raising. These lights started raising up in the air to about 40 feet.

I think I was something like 50 yards from this. These lights were flashing and they got as they got bigger, as I got close to it. It seemed like they were red flashing lights coming out of a porthole, which sort of circled the craft. They had like a catwalk going around the center of it. It was shaped like a football, very metallic, like a very shiny bumper, if you polished a bumper on a car. It had sort of a reddish-orange's glow coming from beneath it.

From the glow, Schumer could make out the craft. It was an oblong disc about 20 feet wide and 15 feet tall. It began to emit a loud beep which became faster, louder, and shriller. Suddenly, the spacecraft shot an orange-red beam toward the ground and quickly vanished. Shermer's initial account of the encounter ends here, with the officer approaching the craft only to see it rise and disappear. But having experienced missing time during the event, Shermer would eventually go under hypnotic regression.

In doing so, he told a much longer story. He had not just seen the spacecraft. He had met with the beings inside of it. Then there was this white flash that came on to me in the patrol car. It felt as if we were being pulled. And then it was being pulled. We were being pulled up the side of this bank to the left of the road. and up toward this fill, the car and I, I felt nothing.

At first I felt kind of stunned and shocked, and then I felt sort of tingly. And as the car and I moved up the bank to the top of this fill, this object landed and some legs came out and it sat down. I was just sitting there really motionless, I couldn't move. This hatch came open. And this light came out of the hatch, and this farm came down, and looked the form of a human being. And this farm started walking toward the patrol car

with an object in both its hands, appear to be hands. And he was walking straight toward the patrol car. As he was doing this, another form came out and started walking toward the patrol car also as this being got in front of the walked up to the front of the patrol car

with this object in his hand which looked sort of a squirish oval type it looked like it had a lens in front of it and the only thing I could think was oh my God what's going to happen now and this green light came out all over the car and then so I went back in again

and I felt a sensation then and then I felt nothing like I was just there and that was it and this other being started walking up toward the car I was sitting straight looking straight I couldn't even move my head

and he walked up to the car and the window was about three quarters of the way he rode down and had an object in his hand a silver object that looked like a big pencil with a round ball on the end of it

and he pressed this against the side of my neck which I felt some pain from and said, ouch then he stepped back and I sort of sat there and he opened up the car door and I sort of raised up out of the troll car and I was looking at him and he was

looking at me and he said, are you the watchman of this town? And my response was, yes, sir. He said, come with me, watchman. The being then took him aboard for a tour of the spacecraft, which was filled with lights, switches, cables, and other instruments. At times, the being appeared to communicate with him telepathically, with words Schumer didn't understand.

The being explained the spacecraft had come to Ashland, to harvest electricity. Schumer would later describe the beings in detail. He would say that they had cat-like eyes and didn't blink. They had gray-white skin and long and thin heads with flat noses and slit-like mouths. They wore silver-gray uniforms, gloves, and helmets, which had a small antenna on the left side of the ear. And at the left breast of each suit, they had the emblem of a winged serpent.

Sherman had the impression that the small antennas were somehow part of their communication process with him. And is this particular being led Shermer through the craft? It was a grand tour of cosmic proportions. And we walked the complete circle in there, and I said, what is this? And he said, this is how our craft operates, and he said it operates on electrical, reversible magnetism. And we walked back over to where I came up in with him, and this glass sheet came down. And we stepped on to this, which I felt. And we moved up into the second level of the craft.

And lo and behold, I've never seen anything like it before in my life with so many different types of instrument panels and computer type things. You just wouldn't believe it. This cone thing was right in the center of the floor. You can see half of it from on top and half of it from the bottom, but it gave off a red glow that sort of not flashed, but kind of died down and then came back up again. And he says, watchman come with me, and we walked over to a screen that was up on the side, I say, wall,

and it was sort of like a TV screen, and he pressed some buttons, and I guess flipped some switches. I wasn't paying too much attention to him. I was looking at the screen. And some stars in the sky appeared on there. And he put his finger up like this, and he said, this is where we're from, watchman.

And then he put his hand back down. He didn't say where, and he didn't say the name. The purpose that we're here is to get electricity. And there was another being standing a little distanced away. and the man turned to him and they both looked at each other and he started depressing buttons and he says watch watchman and there was this antenna on the outside of a spacecraft which angled toward a power unit and this bolt went out a color i've never seen before my life and i don't even think i could describe it went out and came back and this stayed like this for about

three minutes and then it went off and he turned and looked at me and I felt as I was getting a very very an awful lot of role of input of words that I couldn't understand and he reached up

and he touched me on the shoulder and he felt real when he touched me and I think at that time I did touch him and he felt real to me and he says watchmen come with me We walked back over to the exit, I'll say, where we came up, and the glass sheet came down again, and we went up into the third part of the craft, which was the observation deck, he said. As we stepped off, he said, Watchmen, come with me.

And we walked over, and we was standing there looking out of a big plate glass window type thing. And there was a control panel right in front of it, and there were two chairs that looked like dentist chairs. I've rid of a dentist, a chair, but really a superstructure of a chair, better than a dentist chair. We looked out the window, and I could see this one being walking back and forth by where my patrol car was. And I think I said, wow. He turned to me, and he said something, I don't understand. and he said some more things that I didn't understand or couldn't make out, and I still don't. And then he pointed his hand toward the plate glass window, as I say refer to, to the stars out there.

And he says to me, Watchman, one day you yourself will see the universe as I have. And he reached up and he touched me on the shoulder. And he says, come with me, Watchman. And then he stopped and he said, Watchman, and I turned around like this to look at him. And I thought I was like I was getting more input of something that I couldn't understand. Then he says, Watchman come with me. We walked over and we went down all the way out of the craft. As we got outside, this other being started walking back toward the spacecraft and boarded it.

as we were walking toward my patrol car. And we stopped right by the patrol car, and I turned to look at him, and he was looking at me. And then again, it felt like I was receiving an input of words of some kind that I couldn't understand. He sort of lifted his hand, and then he turned and walked back to the spacecraft, floated up inside. This catwalk thing started spinning. The lights started flashing off and off.

This red, orange, glow came out from beneath it. It started lifting up in the air, and I guess it got about 100 feet high and just shot straight out of sight. Let me tell you, I was scared. I started feeling me again. When I was aboard the spacecraft, I had hardly no feeling at all.

My body was tingling, I was aspiring, I was hot, I felt nauseated, I got back into the patrol car. I turned it around and I hit it back for the police station. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Greetings everyone. Ryan Sprague, our host of Summer in the Skies. For over seven years and more than 400 episodes, the Summer in the Sky's podcast has always been free to listen to, but it's not free to create. So we offer several ways to help support our efforts and get rewards in return. If you listen to the podcast on Apple, you can click the subscribe button.

at the top of your Summer in the Sky's feed to become a premium Apple subscriber. Or you can join our Patreon campaign with several tiers available. Both of these options give you the same benefits and rewards, add free episodes, early access to the main show, and bonus episodes and content. Help keep the lights on at the Summer in the Sky's HQ and help us continue to grow by becoming a Patreon subscriber at patreon.com slash somewhere skies.

Or by clicking the subscribe button at the top of your Apple feed. Thank you for your continued support. And keep looking up. Schumer drove back to the station, physically shaken. He went into the station, looked at the clock on the wall, and noticed it was 301 a.m. He immediately went to the bathroom to guzzle down a hefty amount of water. He was very hot and felt dehydrated.

After that, he came back out to his desk, not quite sure what to do next. I sat there at the table, and I lit a cigarette, and I said, wow, what the hell happened? Something happened to me. Did I really see a flying saucer? Did this really happen to me? I looked at my report log, and I remembered through all the training and everything I went through, that regardless of the nature or what it was, Put it in your report book because you just might need it. So I looked at my report book and I got my pen out and I wrote at 2.30 a.m. December 3rd, 1967,

I saw a UFO at Junction 6 and 63, believe it or not. After logging the incident to the best of his knowledge, another officer entered the office around 630 a.m. that morning. He could tell Shermer was distracted and looked shaken. He asked Shermer what had happened to him, but not remembering the entire event at this point, all he told the officer was that he'd seen a flying saucer. The response he got back was a little unexpected. The fellow officer says, I believe you heard.

He says, I don't think you should tell anybody heard because I don't think anybody's going to believe you. Matter of fact, you're going to lose your job. you tell the people. But I said, Paul, it's the truth. He said, well, you know, he said, a lot of people won't even accept the truth. I said, well, I'll wait for the chief. He says, no, I'll go on home.

So I went home, and I was, you know, I really felt like everything was drained completely out of my body. And I laid down the couch. And as I laid there, I started getting a buzzing feeling in my head. And I felt like I was being, I had pressure on my body. I couldn't move my arms. I couldn't, you know how. You try to open up your mouth and you can't say help. I was trying to say help, you know.

And then I went off to sleep and the phone rang and it was the chief. And the chief says, get your butt down to the station right now. What is this? You mean you've seen a UFO? I said, I don't feel good. I'm sick and I'm not coming down to the police station. He said, I'll be right over. So the next thing, the TV came in, press came in, you know, newspapers, radio stations,

and telephone calls started coming in. The story had now made its way across the nation, the local Omaha World Herald, being one of the very first to cover the story. The original article by the Herald attracted the attention of many readers, but it also attracted the attention of the U.S. Air Force and the government. And soon, they wanted to investigate.

The United States Air Force Conn Committee, Blue Book Project, or however you want to say it, investigating team came down to Ash from Nebraska to investigate me. A gentleman by the name of John Irons, who is a friend of mine, and a gentleman by name of Roy Craig, who was a physicist. John Irons, he'd probably hit me, but he was a shrink, a psychiatrist. Tim and I had long discussions, and he told me to tell my story over and over over and over and over and over and over and over and over and then they found a 25-minute time lapse

in my log and john says herb uh what happened to you between 2.30 a.m. December 3rd 1967 and 3 a.m. and i looked at him and i couldn't say anything because i didn't remember so he says you got to come to bowler i said okay So they took me up to Boulder, and I met a UFO team there of a lot of people who run a lot of test on me. And a hypnotist by the name of Dr. Leo Sprinkler administered time of time regression hypnosis on me, which found out a small detail that I had been aboard. the spacecraft and that I had actually communicated with them. They played the tape back to me and it shocked me.

I didn't know what to think. I said, are you, is that really my voice on that tape? You bet it is, boy. I says, my God. What do I do now? The members of Project Blue Book were intrigued but cautious of the story. They would continue to assist in Chermer being put under rigorous hypnotic regression. his story never changing or swaying.

After Shermer heard the tapes of his hypnotic regression sessions, he didn't know what to do. The missing time had now been filled with a story almost too hard to believe, even for Shermer. And as this story started to surface, the ridicule back home in Ashland only intensified. Locals weren't letting the officer off easy for spinning this unbelievable tale

that was making their town laughingstock of the entire state. They harassed him aggressively. So while I was up in Boulder, the city got real cute, you know. Matter of fact, the night I left, they went down to our beautiful cemetery there in Ash, Nebraska, and took this dummy and hung it by the neck and a tree, and put a big star on it, shot a hose through it, paint the hose with red like blood and put herb across the star with a cowboy head on it.

And they really may look big because they went down to the mortuary and they got the amids out of Code 3 runs, sirens, red lights, the whole works. Went over there and they very carefully took it down and put it on a stretcher and covered it up and took it back to the morgue. They thought they scared me, but they didn't, you see. That's what they were trying to do. They were trying to scare me, but they didn't scare me. but they didn't scare me because I thought it was kind of funny,

and I laughed about it when I read it in the paper and seen all the pictures and everything. But while I was in Boulder, they blew my car up with dynamite. And that really made me mad. I just got too paying for it. The harassment continued, and Shermer tried to take it in stride,

but things only seemed to get worse. His own wife didn't believe the story, and after many long nights of arguments, and the unwanted attention put on Shermer. She left him, and so had many of his friends. Meanwhile, the Kanting Committee, in offshoot and response to the work being done by Project Blue Book, gave their conclusions in their official report on Shermer's case,

stating no materials or trace evidence was found at the site of the claimed incident. The area also tested negative for traces of radioactivity. Though the analysis of Dr. Leo Sprinkle and several other hypnotherapists concluded that Schumer sincerely believed in the events he described, the official conclusion by the Conting Committee investigators finally declared they had no confidence that the officers reported UFO experience was physically real. The Condon Committee would later apply the same logic to UFO sightings in general, concluding in 1968 that, quote, nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years

that has added to the scientific knowledge, end quote. Schumer eventually left Ashland, living for a time in the Pacific Northwest, trying to cope with his experience, the aftermath, and the eventual fallout. He continued to make headlines in Omaha throughout the 70s when the World Herald noted his appearances in TV specials and books about UFOs.

Such a sentiment might have been comforting to Shermer in the volatile period after the story spread. In those days and weeks, he saw counsel from friends and family, rarely getting it. But one fellow officer in particular remained steadfast in believing Shermer. Due to the whole crisis,

I had one very good friend in Ashland, Nebraska. His name is Leroy Dimit, very close friend. And he helped me a lot in Ashland. he was one of our relief officers on the police department. And I was really proud to have him as a friend and his way he stuck by. Herbert Shermer died in 2017.

And with him, he took a story so unbelievable yet so genuine in his recounting that we may never really know what happened on that desolate road in Ashland, Nebraska, in 1967. The truth remained. with Shermer. And perhaps the most important vindication for Shermer himself came from his very own father.

Words that Shermer would take with him, but also leave with us to keep searching somewhere in the skies. I went to my father and I said, Dad, I said, I know you have 20-something years in the Air Force. But I asked my father point blank. I said, Dad, what do you think of? UFOs. My father never said no. He never said yes. He just said, son, if you're telling the truth, stick with it. And so I stuck with it. Please take a moment to rate and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever possible. You can find us across all social media by searching for somewhere in the skies. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft.

I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a year. U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident restoration is guaranteed. Pour your money back. Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply.