I was sooo into this story when I was young. It happened 45 years ago today:
On September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were heading home to Portsmouth when they encountered aliens — or so they believed. Whether true or not, their story catapulted them into national celebrity.
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It was September 19, 1961, and the weather report predicted a hurricane along the New Hampshire coast, so Betty and Barney Hill cut their long weekend in Montreal short and headed back to Portsmouth in their 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air.
They stopped at a restaurant in Colebrook, where Betty ate a piece of chocolate layer cake and Barney ate a hamburger. At 10:05 p.m. they were back on Route 3 heading toward the White Mountains.
The sky was clear, and just past Lancaster Betty noticed a bright light close to the nearly full moon. As it got closer and brighter, she pointed it out to Barney, a World War II veteran who knew something about planes. He assumed it was a satellite, perhaps off-course.
Their dachshund, Delsey, was getting antsy, so they pulled over to let her out. Betty took binoculars from the car. With hyperbolic finesse, Fuller described the moment this way: "Betty put the binoculars up to her eyes and focused carefully. What they both were about to see was to change their lives forever, and as some observers claim, change the history of the world."
Afterward, Barney was disinclined to discuss what he had seen, but Betty did so in a letter she wrote soon after to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. "He did see several figures scurrying about as though they were making some kind of hurried type of preparation. One figure was observing us from the windows . . . and seemed to be dressed in some type of shiny black uniform," she wrote. "At this point, my husband became shocked and got back in the car, in a hysterical condition, laughing and repeating that they were going to capture us."
Back in the car, Barney drove wildly in an effort to escape. Past Franconia Notch they left Route 3 and headed down a smaller road.
Betty Hill said recently she was more curious than afraid at the time. "I understood something’s going to happen and I don’t know what it is, but I’m ready for it. At that point I rolled down the window and waved hello to the craft," she said, laughing into the crook of her arm. "At this time I was sure it was a flying saucer, but I didn’t say so."
Suddenly a cluster of beings was blocking their way. Barney stopped the car, but could not restart it. The men came toward them.
For almost three years, their memories would stop at that scene, only to pick up sometime later that night, when they found themselves driving south near Ashland.
The following day Barney, a fastidious dresser, noticed the tops of shoes were badly scuffed. Betty’s dress, which she still can retrieve in a flash from her living-room closet, was ripped near the zipper and covered with powdery pink stains. There were shiny spots on the car trunk that caused a compass to flutter.
Against Barney’s wishes, Betty told her sister about the incident. On her sister’s advice, she reported it to Pease Air Force Base, which took the sighting seriously. According to Pease records, officials there, too, had logged an "unknown" at about 2 a.m. the same morning.
Only after investigators from NICAP and other scientific organizations visited the Hills did they realize their trip had taken at least two hours longer than it should have. They remained haunted by the feeling that something unexplained had happened to them. Betty had recurring nightmares.
In February, the Hills began making pilgrimages to the White Mountains to try to retrace their route. They were unsuccessful, but they did meet many people in the region who had seen strange lights and flying objects.
"Actually, that was just the beginning," Hill said of the initial encounter.
Their public lives continued more or less as usual after their UFO encounter, but by 1964 their psychological anxiety still had not abated. Barney had an ulcer that was not responding to treatment. He missed work and both were depressed.
Eventually they were referred to the Boston office of Dr. Benjamin Simon, a noted psychiatrist who specialized in hypnosis. The conversations that transpired during their trances became a permanent chapter in the annals of ufology.
Fuller made liberal use of the tape recordings of the hypnosis sessions, which revealed episodes of rapture and terror.
"BARNEY: Heh, heh, Betty. That’s the funniest thing, Betty. They funniest thing. I never believed in flying saucers but – I don’t know. Mighty mysterious. Yeah, well, I guess I won’t say anything to anybody about this. It’s too ridiculous, isn’t it? Oh yes, really funny. Wonder where they came from? Oh gee, I wish I had the – I wish I had gone with them . . .
DOCTOR: You wish you had gone with them?
BARNEY: Yes. Oh what an experience to go to some distant planet. (A pause as he reflects, then:) Maybe this will prove the existence of God. (Another brief pause.) Isn’t that funny? To look for the existence of God on another planet?"
Betty was interviewed separately. "BETTY: (She is beginning to get upset again.) It won’t hurt me. And I ask him what, and he said he just wants to put it in my navel, it’s just a simple test. (More rapid sobbing) And I tell him, no, it will hurt, don’t do it. And I’m crying, and I’m telling him, ‘It’s hurting, it’s hurting, take it out, take it out!’ And the leader comes over and he puts his hand, rubs his hand in front of my eyes, and he says it will be all right. I won’t feel it."
MUFON’s Geremia has listened to the tapes. "It’s enough to make you not sleep at night," he said. "There’s one particular portion, when Barney is reliving what happened, really reliving every moment, and he lets out a scream on that tape that’s absolutely bone-chilling."
After months of hypnosis, a fantastic story had emerged. Simon could not entirely dismiss or accept the results; he did not think they were lying, but he attributed their story to some kind of shared fantasy, perhaps a folie a deux.
The Hills recounted that they were taken on board by beings whose eyes were disproportionately large and slanted. Betty said one of them spoke English to her, though not very well.
They were medically examined – flakes of skin scraped off Betty’s arm, her reflexes tested, and a needle inserted in her navel. Although it does not appear in Fuller’s book, Mack reports that a semen sample was taken from Barney, who was examined in a different room from Betty.
When they finished with her, Betty asked the "leader" where he was from and he showed her a complicated cosmic map, which Betty later drew. She asked for proof of their visit and he gave her a book written in strange symbols, but then changed his mind and took it back.
"I recognized the importance of what was happening," Hill said recently. "I knew these were astronauts from another solar system. I told the leader, ‘This has been the most wonderful experience of my life,’ and that I really appreciated meeting him and would he please come back because I had a lot of friends who would like to meet him."
I basically bought into the Betty and Barney Hill story, chronicled in the book "The Interrupted Journey". But years after the publication of that book, Betty just kept on seeing those UFOs, right up to her death in 2004 (Barney died back in 1969).
She claims to have more than 250 photographs of UFOs. To this day she sees them, sometimes flying over her house in Portsmouth, or hovering above her yard, where her cats and chickens roam.
And when those stories started coming out, that’s when I got off the bus.
[H/T: Mom]
RELATED: Today there’s news that the space shuttle Atlantis spotted a UFO — 45 years to the day after Betty and Barney’s abduction. Coincidence?!?
The truth is out there.