Encounters with the Unknown
The Shane Kurz Case
by: Brent Raynes
In The Ufonauts: New Facts on Extraterrestrial Landings (1976), Hans Holzer, the original “ghost hunter,” departed from his usual journalistic forays into the paranormal to delve deeply into the mysteries of ufology. During this assignment, Holzer was contacted by a young lady named Shane Kurz, who was looking for a competent hypnotist. She stated that she had a period of amnesia in her life that she wanted to explore.
Holzer learned that Miss Kurz’s UFO interest first developed following a series of strange experiences that befell her and her mother back in the spring of 1968, when the area around her childhood home in the small town of Westmoreland, New York, became the focus of an intense wave of UFO activity. Both Shane and her mother were initially skeptical of the local reports, until one night when they were both outside skywatching with a telescope and observed overhead a bright cigar shaped object in the sky that moved in elliptical and circular patterns, occasionally coming to a complete stop. They both had the uneasy feeling of having been watched.
“This intangible feeling became very real the night of April 15 when I was awakened at 2 a.m. by my mother,” Shane told Holzer. That morning, Shane’s mom awakened her, asking her how she could sleep with the bright light coming into their bedroom (mother and daughter shared the same room). At first Shane was aware of an intense blaze of flashing light entering her bedroom window that faced the street. Then it became a white beam of light so bright that it illuminated every corner of the room. Looking out the window, they could both see that the strange light was coming from a house across the street that bordered a meadow. Then silently the light began to move upward and then was simply gone.
A couple of weeks later, on May 2nd, Shane was alone outside the house skywatching when she was startled by the sudden appearance again of the cigar-shaped object. She said that it silently flew in at a great speed, then came to a complete stop, turned red in color and then shot upwards and out of sight at high speed. Everything happened too fast for her to call her mom or any other family member outside to see this spectacle. Half an hour later, she went to bed, quickly falling into a seemingly deep and dreamless sleep state. The next thing Shane knew her mother was shaking her awake asking her, “Where have you been?” Shane stated that she had difficulty awakening, feeling as if she had been drugged. Then she realized that she was laying in her bed with her robe and slippers on, both covered in dried mud, along with her legs. Her mother explained that she had awakened around 4 a.m. to find her missing from her bedroom. However, she assumed that Shane had gotten up for some valid reason, perhaps to go to the bathroom, and simply hadn’t returned back to bed yet, and so returned to hers and went back to sleep. But then sometime later she awoke again and this time discovered the front door open with muddy footprints that led up to the bedroom and it was at this time that she found her daughter covered with dried mud. The mother had taken her daughter’s slippers with her across the street to the field there and she matched the mud on the slippers with the reddish mud there. Though Shane had never been known to walk in her sleep before, her mother assumed that must have been the explanation.
Immediately after this experience, Shane began to undergo physical and mental changes. “A couple of days later I noticed two reddish, ring-shaped marks on either side of my lower abdomen and a line running from my navel down,” Shane recalled. “In the two days preceding the experience, I experienced pain and nausea and severe migraines. I stayed out of school for the next two days also, suffering from nightmares and depression.”
A month later, Shane began having UFO dreams. In these dreams she was always across the street in the field, she was wearing the same robe, an oval or cigar-shaped object with bright flashing lights appears and hovers low overhead, she sees faces in the object’s windows, and then she is aware of a warm beam of light focused upon her and, though she closes her eyes, she feels that she is floating and moving upwards. “It is always the same,” she explained. “I wake up sweating, crying, saying, ‘No! No!’” The dreams might occur every three or six months, or once a year, but they were always the same.
Another odd thing that occurred after the May 2nd event was that Shane did not have another period for almost a year. In February 1973, her menstrual cycle returned to regularity again, just as Dr. Chantry, a gynecologist at St. Luke’s Hospital in Utica, New York, had told her that it eventually would. She said that after a complete examination and many tests, Dr. Chantry had told her, “You seem to be completely healthy now. I can’t explain why you’ve stopped your period.” As for the cause, Shane says the doctor told her, “All that I can tell you is I feel you have had some traumatic experience, which has caused a great deal of shock to you. Something happened that caused your physical period to stop.” He gave her some medicine and told her not to worry, adding that “after awhile you will remember it, and your period will come back.”
During a nine month time span after the May 2nd incident Shane started to lose weight, lost her appetite, was often in an extremely depressed state, and at night she would notice that her hearing seemed elevated beyond what it had been.
Holzer arranged to meet with Shane to conduct a regressive hypnosis session to see if this process might cast some significant light upon what had happened. This occurred on the afternoon of February 21, 1975. The “ghost hunter” now turned UFO investigator/author found what other hypnotists have found with other abductees. “Surprisingly, despite her harrowing experiences, Shane turned out to be an excellent subject for hypnosis,” Holzer wrote. “Within five or six minutes I was able to take her down to the second and third stage, and as I saw that she was indeed fully under, I proceeded to regress her to May 2, 1968.”
Like the “dreams,” the hypnotic memory that surfaced detailed Shane being beamed up into this “saucer” with flashing lights, complete with the “windows” and “those people,” though this time she finds herself coming into a room resembling a “bare hospital room,” where everything is white. Then she is asked by a being, who knows her name, to accompany him to a table. “You’re special,” she is told. A little man with hypnotic eyes she finds difficult to resist moves her closer to the table. Another similar being appears from behind her and together they tell her to lay down.
The creatures make a strange humming sound. “I can understand it,” Shane stated. “But it is always like a hum in my ears, it is coming through, I know what he is saying. He keeps telling me to relax.” However, she continues to fight the men and tries to get off the table. She is told that they want to make a baby and she informs them that she doesn’t want their child, that it would be a freak.
A being appears who she calls “the doctor.” “He keeps looking at me,” Shane recalls under hypnosis. “He says, you’ve got to take your clothes off. I can’t resist.” He produces a needle. “Oh God, I can see,” Shane recalls. “It is long. I’m trying to move my arms, cover up my navel. He wants to put that in…..He keeps putting his hands over my eyes and says it won’t hurt.” Initially it does, feeling like something puncturing her stomach, hurting her navel, and then suddenly the pain vanishes.
Eventually, Shane is alone with the one she identifies as the leader. They are both naked. The “leader” takes a jelly substance from a tube and rubs it over her abdomen and chest. She is told that it stimulates.
“I feel terrible…I am enjoying it,” a hypnotized Shane says. “And I’m trying not to. But I think it is that jelly. He is humming. He is like an animal. He moans. He is raping me, and I don’t want to…”
Holzer, at this point, decides to calm Shane down, suggesting that it was all over, and that she was being taken back. She calms down immediately. Still under hypnosis she describes how the leader is then putting her robe back on her, she next finds herself seated, and the leader is once again fully clothed. She then hits him and says “you’ve raped me,” and he says “no,” and then tells her that she can go. Soon she is seemingly floated back down to the ground in a beam of light, and the UFO moves quickly away, as she lays on the ground crying, and then Shane finds herself confused as to how she got to be there.
Reference: The UFOnauts: New Facts on Extraterrestrial Landings, by Hans Holzer. A Fawcett Gold Medal Book (paperback), Fawcett Publications, Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut. 1976.
