The Bill Herrmann Abduction

Bill Herrmann was near the Ashley River outside Charleston when he saw a pancake-shaped domed disc working its way along power lines in triangular patterns. He followed it. Then came a blue beam, a blackout, and waking paralysed on an examining table with small beings around him and a cold metal box resting on his chest. He was released in a field near Summerville, some fifteen miles from where he started. To him only minutes seemed to have passed. Other tellings put the lost time at two hours or at roughly four, and they do not agree.

What is on the record

Fourteen tellings across eleven videos on two independent channels carry the case, and between them they yield four claimants: Herrmann, his wife Patty, Wendell Stevens and Dr Carl Harper, who is said to have photographed the same style of craft in the same area without knowing of Herrmann. The material is testimony and no government paperwork sits behind it.

The beings are described as roughly four and a half feet tall and pale and hairless. Some tellings put them in red jumpsuits and others in rust-coloured tracksuits with a winged-serpent emblem, and one channel compares them with the beings in Travis Walton's account. They spoke telepathically in what Herrmann called perfect English and explained their propulsion as gravity manipulation. Under regression he said they called themselves stellar astronomers from Zeta Reticuli. The most striking element is a request. They are reported to have asked him to help arrange the release of crashed craft and dead crew held by the United States government. He replied that he was nobody and had no such connections.

The photographs are the other strand. One telling has him photographing a silver disc on the way to church. Another has him guided telepathically to a field near the Air Force base, where a two-domed disc manoeuvred near a passing C-130. He says the Air Force then told him it was an F-4 Phantom and intimidated him. The tellings describe four sets of colour photographs taken in 1979 and 1980, the clearest on 4 April 1980. APRO is said to have put his testimony through PSE and polygraph tests. Later come a man posing as Tom Olson who arranged an injection of greenish liquid, and silent phone calls to Herrmann and Fielding at fifteen minutes past every hour.

Much of the detail came back through hypnotic regression, and one telling describes an underwater facility in Argentina. Neither can be tested. Our own study of recall method found regression accounts are not systematically richer than conscious ones.

Why it sits where it does

Herrmann grades L3, the tier for multiple independent tellings of one connected event. Two channels carry it and the accounts agree on the disc, the beam, the table and the small pale beings. Read together, the tellings describe a run of episodes around Charleston from late 1977 into 1980 rather than one night. What took Bill Herrmann off a Carolina roadside, if anything did, is not resolved here.