The Alien Abduction Case of Barney and Betty Hill is the most famous and probably the most extensively documented case of "alien abduction" that took place on September 19, 1961 in Whitfield, New Hampshire, USA. After a trip to Canada, Barney and Betty Hill returned home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Late at night, they were driving south along Federal Highway 3 and suddenly noticed a UFO in the sky - a bright, luminous object moving on a variable course. The Hill couple, perplexed, continued on their way, although the object appeared to follow them.
At first, they decided that in front of them was nothing more than a small plane. When Barney and Betty Hill's car reached the White Mountains, the UFO, which had significantly increased in size, approached them and hovered above the ground at an altitude of 80 - 100 feet (~ 30 meters). Barney Hill stopped the car and got out to examine the unusual aircraft through binoculars. In disbelief, he counted eleven figures moving behind a row of UFO windows.
“Incomprehensible! Incredible!”He kept repeating to his shocked wife. Subsequently, Barney Hill recalled that they were humanoids, dressed in shiny black uniforms. By this time, the UFO was already less than eight meters close to them, and Barney rushed into the car shouting: "They want to capture us!", After which he started the car and sharply pressed the gas pedal. But the car, not having time to pick up speed, shook. Barney Hill pulled up and felt himself falling asleep.
The Hills woke up two hours later, thirty miles from where Barney had stopped the car. Although the couple did not stay anywhere else on the road, and the two short stops took them only a few minutes, they arrived two hours late. To be on the safe side, Barney and Betty Hill reported the night incident to the local air command headquarters. They found out that on the night of September 20, the radar station attendant spotted and briefly accompanied an unidentified flying object. Professor Jacques Vallee discovered in the archives of the Strategic Bomber Aviation Regiment an official document for 1961 (No. 100-1-61), which refers to the observation of UFOs by the radar operator 0214.
Over the next two years, the Hill couple suffered from nervous breakdowns and remarkably realistic dreams. It seemed to them that they were on board an alien ship. In the end, unable to cope with the disturbing visions, the Hills turned to Dr. Benjamin Simon, a Boston psychiatrist who specialized in treating mental disorders with hypnotherapy. The services of this one of the most expensive psychiatrists in America were paid for by a private ufological organization - the National Committee for the Study of Atmospheric Phenomena (NICAP).
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For six months, from January 1964, the Hill couple were under the supervision of Dr. Simon, and their strange story gradually cleared up. Preserved 45 hours of audio recording of the stories of the spouses about what happened on board the UFO. Under hypnosis, Barney Hill "remembered" that he was taken aboard a spaceship, where aliens with huge eyes underwent a kind of medical examination. Barney and Betty Hill's stories about that night were exactly the same.
When the car stopped, a group of humanoids, about one and a half meters tall, with triangular heads and gray skin, pulled them out of the car. The space aliens had large slanted eyes, mouths like small slits. Their speech in the minds of the Hill was incomprehensibly translated into English.
Barney: “The eyes are very wide apart, and their field of view seemed to be much larger than ours. I have not noticed any sign of hair or headgear. I also did not notice the nose, instead I could see a pair of, apparently, nostril holes."
Betty: “I got the impression that the commander and whoever researched me were different from the rest of the team. The noses are larger than average, the hair and eyes are very dark, the eyes are like those of a cat."
At the time of the abduction, one of the abductors directed at the spouses sitting in the car some "sharp contraption, similar to a pencil," after which their will was almost completely paralyzed. The humanoids lifted the spouses aboard their ship. Inside, they were stripped and subjected to what might be called tests and assorted samples.
Betty Hill said that the "doctors" studied the skin of her hands, looked into her ears, nose and throat, examined her stomach. She also remembered that when the “doctor” began to insert a long needle into her navel, she protested in pain. Then the "captain" put his hand over her eyes, and the pain immediately passed. One of the "researchers" said it was a pregnancy test.
After the inspection, the "captain" helped Betty Hill get off the table and get dressed. Trying how firmly Barney's teeth were holding in his mouth, the "doctor" unexpectedly pulled out his false lower jaw. Unusually agitated, the alien tried to do the same to Betty. But that was not the case - her teeth were real.
On this occasion, the head of the Ufological Center in Evanston, Illinois, astrophysicist Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who took part in the sessions of regressive hypnosis, joked: not . (Barney Hill was black and Betty Hill was white)
But, perhaps, the most surprising and had unexpected consequences occurred when Betty Hill, emboldened, asked the "captain" where they had come from. In response, he showed the place on the "star map", which she subsequently reproduced under hypnosis.
Betty Hill recalls:
I asked the "chief" where he was from, because I know, I told him, that he was not from Earth. He asked if I knew anything about the universe? I answered in the negative. I practically didn't know anything. He said that he would like me to know more. I replied that I would like to. He crossed the room to the corner of the table and opened something. He pulled out a map and asked if I had seen heavenly maps before. I crossed the room and leaned on the table.
I looked: the map was oblong, slightly wider. Points were scattered across the map. Some were small, like pinheads. Others were about the size of a coin. There were lines, curved lines, going from one point to another. Many lines radiated from the great circle. Many of them went to another circle, the nearest one, but not so big. They were thick lines.
I asked him what they mean. He replied that thick lines are commercial routes. Other lines marked the places where they sometimes went. Dotted lines showed expeditions. I asked him where he was from. He answered me with a question: "Where are you on this map?" I said laughing that I didn't know. Then he said: "If you do not know where you are, then I cannot explain to you where I am from."
An amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish from Ohio became interested in the Betty Hill map. Fish proceeded from the fact that if there is at least some grain of truth in the map drawn by Betty, then it should reflect the section of the starry sky observed by aliens from their home planet, from where the UFO came.
Fish's job was not easy. She took 200 beads, which she imagined as stars located 50 light-years from Earth. Depending on their spectrum, she painted the beads in different colors and hung them from the ceiling on threads of different lengths, observing the distance scale. And for five years she spent all her free time looking at her "galactic map", as if looking from one star or another. Fish found the same place from where the starry sky opened up such a view as on the map of Betty Hill. The supposed homeland of the aliens turned out to be the stars of the Grid constellation - Zeta I or Zeta II, located 37 light years from Earth - about 350 trillion kilometers.
Professional astronomers praised Fish's work very highly. Ohio State University professor Walter Mitchell with a group of students undertook to check it. The two large balls drawn by Betty Hill were identified by Fish as the stars Zeta I and Zeta II in the constellation Grid. Mitchell put into a computer the position of hundreds of stars closest to us and compiled a program that simulates the starry sky as seen from the Zeta Grid towards the Sun. Strikingly, the map almost exactly matched Betty Hill's drawing.
The following fact is even more mysterious. Betty Hill made her drawing under hypnosis in 1964. Fish recognized nine stars in this drawing, but could not identify three stars. These three stars were discovered by astronomers later, in 1969. In 1961, when Betty was "kidnapped", and in 1964, when she was drawing maps, not a single earthling knew about these luminaries. And only a few years later, on the basis of the new astronomical data obtained, it became known that Betty Hill, with an amazing degree of accuracy, drew a map of the subsequently discovered cluster of stars, called the Zeta Grid.
Another coincidence seems no less curious. From Betty Hill's diagram it followed that from the stars Zeta-1 and Zeta-2 routes were laid not only to the Sun, but also to the well-known astronomers Tau Ceti and Epsilon (82) Eridani. By a strange coincidence, it was these stars from hundreds of "suspicious" for the presence of planetary systems that were selected by American astronomers in the early 1960s for the first time for radio listening under the OZMA program. At that time, this program was headed by a young but already respected astronomer, Dr. Francis Drake.
On April 8, 1960, that is, even before the incident with the Hill spouses, they began listening to these stars at a wavelength of 21 cm. No signals were detected from Tau Ceti, and the antenna was transferred to Epsilon Eridani. And almost immediately, the recorders recorded signals of clearly artificial origin. They soon stopped and were caught again two weeks later. At the same time, they were received by the Naval Laboratory. According to investigators, the signals did not come from Epsilon Eridani, but from some closer source. The Pentagon said something about a top-secret military facility, but few believed in these explanations.
The Hill incident was widely publicized, mixed with a fair amount of skepticism. For example, the famous ufologist Jacques Vallee called the above-mentioned "star map" nonsense. The Hill spouses' statements made in a state of hypnosis also raised serious doubts. The fact is that regressive hypnosis has long established itself as a highly unreliable way of extracting so-called repressed memories. People under hypnosis are quite capable of lying and even do it. Falsifiers may well recall, being in prostration, what was invented by them, and not at all real events, and they did not react in any way to control questions when the examiner was sure that the subjects knew the correct answer.
Sigmund Freud, who introduced regressive hypnosis into the number of methods used in psychoanalysis, later abandoned it himself. Working with this method with his patients, Freud noted that the majority of "memories" arise false. The patient remembers not what happened, but what the psychiatrist wants. As a result, psychiatrist Benjamin Simon concluded that an unusual luminous object most likely really was. Simon considered it a kind of natural phenomenon, which the tired Hill couple saw at night on a deserted mountain road. And everything else is the fantasies and dreams of 41-year-old Betty Hill, who inspired them and her weak-willed husband.
NICAP chairman Donald Kihoy said that this story is over. The Hill Case became the basis for John Fuller's book The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard A Flying Saucer (1966) and the feature film The UFO Incident, 1975).
Betty Hill was extremely reluctant to give interviews after becoming famous for holding a grudge against the press, which, in her opinion, “commercialized” her life. Too many people "with crazy ideas, fantasies and wild imaginations" began reporting their UFO abduction, she said. “According to every report, up to 5,000 people are kidnapped in the US every night. There is not so much room in the sky for airplanes,”she said in a rare interview with the Associated Press. According to her, the perception of UFOs that has developed in society thanks to the media is incorrect. “Newspaper UFOs are large bright luminous and blinking balls in all directions, but this is not so. They are very compact, emit dim light, and most often fly with absolutely no lights."
In 1995, she tried to expose the UFO phenomenon by publishing the book "UFOs from the standpoint of common sense" with her own money, but until her death she remained a lonely crazy old woman for skeptics. Betty Hill spent her last years at her home in Portsmouth, where she, hopelessly ill, was released by doctors to live out her term. Barney Hill died in February 1969 from a cerebral hemorrhage, Betty Hill died in October 2004 from lung cancer at the age of 84. Until her death, she insisted that she had really been abducted by aliens.
