Page Content (OCR)
were finished. The object took off, and the now-excited grain buyer headed for Kearney. Within twenty-four hours the authorities had him locked up in a nearby mental institution for observation. Air Force officers materialized and branded the poor man as a nut. A search of the alleged landing site revealed puddles of the purple liquid so common at such spots all over the world, and there were indentations in the ground where the object stood. But when the sheriff searched Schmidt’s car, he found an open can of oil in the trunk and accused him of having spread it around the site. Schmidt not only denied ownership of the can but pointed out, reasonably, that it would be rather foolish to drive around with an open oil can in the back of any car. Later, after he was released, Schmidt lectured widely and howled loud and long about the treatment he had received. Ufologists noted that his story improved with age, and new embellishments were added each time he told it. Apparently he claimed other contacts of some sort and revealed that he knew the location of a wonderful quartz mine in California. The space people had told him that this quartz would cure cancer. He started to raise money to mine the quartz, and eventually some of his investors hauled him into court, where he was indicted as a swindler. Thus, Reinhold Schmidt joined the unhappy ranks of the contactees—a thoroughly discredited man. Yet, his original story made as much sense as any other contactee story, and he seemed to experience many of the same problems reported by the other pawns in this ultraterrestrial game. There were repeated contacts and manipulations that convinced him of the apparent validity of the ufonaut claims and led him down the long road to total disaster. A massive flap condition existed throughout the world during the week of Schmidt’s unfortunate encounter. And there were a number of other contacts, all grouped within thirty-six hours of Schmidt’s. Some of these contacts produced details that tended to corroborate the others. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union hurled the first man-made satellite into space. It was not visible to the naked eye. A month later, on November 3, 1957, Sputnik II carried the ill-fated Russian dog, Laika, into orbit. Three days after that, at 6:30 A.M. on the moming of November 6, a twelve-year-old farmboy, Everett Clark of Dante, Tennes- see, got up to let out his dog, Frisky, and was nonplussed to see a strange glowing object resting in a field about 300 feet from the house. Thinking that he was dreaming, young Clark shuffled back to bed. A few minutes later he returned to the door to call his dog, and he “You Are Endangering the Balance of the Universe!" / 187