extraordinary%20encounters

184 Mr. X
See Also: Atlantis; Bonnie; Fairies encountered;
Lemuria; Shaver mystery
Further Reading
Commander X [pseud. of Jim Keith], 1990. Under -
ground Alien Bases. New Brunswick, NJ: Abelard
Productions.
De Camp, L. Sprague, 1980. The Ragged Edge of Sci -
ence. Philadelphia, PA: Owlswick Press.
Frank, Emilie A., 1998. Mt. Shasta, California’s Mys -
tic Mountain. Hilt, CA: Photografix Publishing.
Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989. Subterranean Worlds:
100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost
Races, and UFOs from inside the Earth. Port
Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.
Tierney, Richard L., 1983. “America’s Mystical
Mount Shasta.” Fate 36, 8 (August): 70–76.
Mr. X
On the afternoon of November 5, 1957,
Reinhold Schmidt, a grain buyer with a
prison re c o rd, allegedly encountered the
c rew of a landed flying saucer along the
banks of Ne b r a s k a’s Platte Rive r. Tw o
c rewmembers ushered him inside, where he
met two other men and two women, all of
whom spoke “high Ge r m a n” to one another
and German-inflected English to Schmidt.
Their captain identified himself as “Mr. X.”
After a brief conversation about America’s
satellite program, Schmidt left the craft,
which then depart e d .
When Schmidt reported his encounter to
the sheriff ’s office in nearby Kearney, officers
went to the site and found footprints as well
as a greasy substance at the supposed landing
site. They also located two empty oil cans not
far away, leading them to suspect a hoax. After
being held overnight in jail, Schmidt was examined
by two psychiatrists and pronounced
mentally ill. He spent a few days in the Hastings
State Hospital before being released.
Thereafter, he pursued a career on the contactee
scene, claiming further contacts with
Mr. X and his associates, who he learned were
from Saturn. His space friends flew him
around the world, to Egypt, to the Antarctic,
and elsewhere. It all ended, however, after he
told a California widow that from a spaceship
he had seen quartz crystals with healing pow-
ers and persuaded her to invest in a worthless
mining venture. At a trial in Oakland in October
1961, a young astronomer named Carl
Sagan assured the jury that human life could
not exist on Saturn. Schmidt received a oneto
ten-year sentence for grand theft.
See Also: Contactees
Further Reading
“‘Flying Saucer’ Figure Convicted,” 1961. Oakland
[California] Tribune, October 27.
“The Kearney, Nebraska, ‘Contact’ Claim,” 1957.
CSI News Letter 10 (December 15): 12–13.
Schmidt, Reinhold O., 1963. The Edge of Tomorrow:
A True Account of Experiences with Visitors from
Another Planet. Hollywood, CA: self-published.
MU the Mantis Being
A West Virginia woman who prefers to use
the pseudonym Rebecca Grant says she has
had a lifetime of paranormal experiences, including
missing-time episodes and apparent
UFO abductions. When she was forty years
old, aliens revealed themselves to her. At first
the communications were purely telepathic.
After two years they began to appear physically
to her. These appearances, always brief,
at first frightened her, but in due course she
became friendly with a being who looked like
a giant praying mantis, a kind of entity sometimes
reported by abductees. The mantis
being, apparently possessing a sense of humor,
conveyed the idea that he would like to be
called MU, short for “Master of the Universe,”
though Grant said she would prefer
that he be “MU-Bug . . . to help keep things
in perspective.” MU communicates telepathically
and is not physically present during the
communications.
MU told her that he and his race had helped
life evo l ve on Earth. Close to one hundred diff
e rent alien groups visit Earth, some from other
places in the galaxy, some from parallel universes.
They are on Earth because of their concern
about what human beings are doing to the
p l a n e t’s environment. Though they possess the
means to do so, they are not repairing the damage
because humans have to learn to do that
t h e m s e l ves; alien help would only prolong hu-