The Kearney Incident: Reinhold O. Schmidt and the Landed Craft by the Platte River

Early November 1957. Sputnik 2 had launched on November 3. Days earlier, drivers around Levelland, Texas, had reported engines dying beneath strange lights. The country was in the middle of a UFO wave. Reinhold O. Schmidt was a grain buyer working the fields around Kearney, Nebraska. On the afternoon of Tuesday, November 5, he finished checking milo and corn at about 2:30 p.m., near an old sand bed on the Platte River.

He saw a bright flash ahead and drove toward it. There was no noise. About 100 feet from the river bank, his car stopped. It would not restart.

At first the object looked like a large, half-inflated balloon. Up close it was something else. A silvery craft, like polished steel or aluminium, standing on four hydraulic rams. Later estimates put it at about 100 feet long, 30 feet wide and 14 feet high. At about 30 feet, a beam "about as big around as a pencil" struck him across the chest. For a moment he could not move. Then two men came out and escorted him aboard.

The crew looked human. Dark hair, sun-tanned skin, ordinary street clothes. Schmidt counted four men and two women. The leader, whom he called "Mr. X", did most of the talking. They seemed to glide rather than walk. Among themselves they spoke what he called High German. To him, they spoke English with a German accent. The walls were about a foot thick and glassy, and he could see outside through them. Two women watched four tubes of red, green, blue and orange liquid rise and fall. Mr. X would not say where they came from. He did say the first two American satellites would not get off the ground.

After about half an hour, a crewman said "Wir sind fertig". We are finished. Schmidt was told to leave, and he watched. A sound like a large electrical motor. Then the ship went straight up. At about 12 feet it turned pitch black. At about 100 feet it turned bluish-green and headed southwest. At about 150 feet, it vanished in a flash.

A deputy sheriff went to the site and, by Schmidt's account, found four imprints in the dry river bed and a dark green, sweet-smelling oil. The chief of police, the city attorney and a Kearney Hub reporter followed. That evening a "spaceship" news flash went out. Schmidt spent about 16 hours at the police station giving interviews.

By morning, officials wanted him to take it back. He refused. He was held, and a county hearing sent him to Hastings State Hospital. He was released after about two weeks.

NORAD in Colorado Springs had 46 UFO reports from across the country and picked three for further study. Kearney was one. Two Air Force investigators were sent. A statement attributed to the Air Force concluded that "local officials consider originator wholly unreliable." The case against Schmidt was simple. Police found only his own footprints. The oil matched a can of ordinary motor oil linked to his car. A background check turned up a 1938 embezzlement conviction. Schmidt never budged. He said the cans had round holes, while his own opener made triangular ones.

Schmidt went on to claim more contacts, at Elm Creek, in the Arctic and at the Great Pyramid, and toured with contactees Wayne Sulo Aho and John Otto. In Bakersfield, California, he told elderly listeners that the spacemen had shown him cancer-curing quartz crystals. He was convicted of grand theft on October 26, 1961. Carl Sagan testified for the prosecution about whether Saturn could support life. The story lives on in his booklets, in the Ormond film Edge of Tomorrow, and in a 2023 lecture in Kearney by historian Nathan Tye, "UFOs Over the Platte River".