Spring Break
The abduction of Raymond Shearer
By: Aaron Sakulich
Issue date: 6/1/07 Section: Ed-Op
Originally published: 6/1/07 at 3:39 AM EST
Last update: 6/1/07 at 3:39 AM EST
Originally published: 6/1/07 at 3:39 AM EST
Last update: 6/1/07 at 3:39 AM EST
Meet Raymond Shearer, a 32-year-old attorney from Wisconsin. He seemed to have it all: a decent job, a wife and no reason for anyone to say "this guy's off his rocker." All of that was about to change, however, when space aliens abducted him.
The story is more or less standard fare: driving home from a late-night meeting with a client, he spotted a bright light in the sky. Passing under it, his radio failed and for some reason the interior of the car got very warm. Not thinking too much of it, he kept driving until, just a few miles from his house, he pulled off of the highway and down a deserted back road. He then drove up on a spaceship sitting in the road. The crew, of course, brought him aboard, performed some terrible medical experiments, told him some technobabble about how their spaceship worked, erased his memories, and then dropped him off again to continue his drive home. Naturally, these memories only surfaced much later during a hypnosis session. They revealed that, for some reason, this chump had been turned into an alien spy to invade our government.
People who believe in such flying boogieman nonsense generally make a number of claims, and one of them is that never, ever, in the history of mankind, has an alien abduction been properly shown in the media. No TV show, movie or book, they argue, has ever shown things properly, and therefore there can be no social cause for the alien abduction phenomenon. Instead of my usual chowchow of foul language and clean logic, today, I am going to raise a monument to eBay and my lack of fiscal responsibility by going through his story step by step and providing at least one source from which Shearer could have copied ideas.
Shearer claims that he was suddenly compelled to turn down a side road and the UFO was sitting in the field ahead of him. There was also a light in the sky that seems to have interfered with his car radio. Both of these are similar to the story of Betty and Barney Hill. They claimed to have been driving down the road, spotted an object in the sky, had trouble with their car radios, and then seen a UFO in the road into which they were dragged and experimented on. The problem with the Shearer case is the date: depending on the source, he was either abducted in April of 1970 or sometime in 1978. The Hill story was turned into a TV movie (starring James Earl Jones as Barney) in 1975, though they wrote a book in 1966. Either way, both were nationally advertised and well known, and he would have heard of it.
The story is more or less standard fare: driving home from a late-night meeting with a client, he spotted a bright light in the sky. Passing under it, his radio failed and for some reason the interior of the car got very warm. Not thinking too much of it, he kept driving until, just a few miles from his house, he pulled off of the highway and down a deserted back road. He then drove up on a spaceship sitting in the road. The crew, of course, brought him aboard, performed some terrible medical experiments, told him some technobabble about how their spaceship worked, erased his memories, and then dropped him off again to continue his drive home. Naturally, these memories only surfaced much later during a hypnosis session. They revealed that, for some reason, this chump had been turned into an alien spy to invade our government.
People who believe in such flying boogieman nonsense generally make a number of claims, and one of them is that never, ever, in the history of mankind, has an alien abduction been properly shown in the media. No TV show, movie or book, they argue, has ever shown things properly, and therefore there can be no social cause for the alien abduction phenomenon. Instead of my usual chowchow of foul language and clean logic, today, I am going to raise a monument to eBay and my lack of fiscal responsibility by going through his story step by step and providing at least one source from which Shearer could have copied ideas.
Shearer claims that he was suddenly compelled to turn down a side road and the UFO was sitting in the field ahead of him. There was also a light in the sky that seems to have interfered with his car radio. Both of these are similar to the story of Betty and Barney Hill. They claimed to have been driving down the road, spotted an object in the sky, had trouble with their car radios, and then seen a UFO in the road into which they were dragged and experimented on. The problem with the Shearer case is the date: depending on the source, he was either abducted in April of 1970 or sometime in 1978. The Hill story was turned into a TV movie (starring James Earl Jones as Barney) in 1975, though they wrote a book in 1966. Either way, both were nationally advertised and well known, and he would have heard of it.
Husain
posted 6/01/07 @ 5:45 PM EST
I Think too that shearer's story was doctored from old movies ( good research). My personal view about aliens and the related story is , if they exist and have such technological advancement , why would they contact or abduct any earthly beings , they would have better ways to find out earthly secrets , assuming they are technically more advanced than us. (Continued…)