Spooky or Not: The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill
Here's a story you've heard before: a person or persons is driving along a remote highway in America late at night. They haven't seen another car in quite some time. A mysterious light appears in the sky and follows them. They're struck with a sense of terror and dread, which only increases when the light gets nearer and they realize it's some sort of craft. Then they suddenly wake up, their car stationary by the side of the road, with no recollection of stopping the car or falling asleep. Several hours have passed unaccounted for. Vague, unsettling memories circulate in our hapless protagonists' heads and they go home with a lingering sense that something bad has happened.
As I said, you've heard all of this before. What you may not know is that this story didn't percolate out of the collective unconsciousness in bits in pieces. The archetypical alien abduction story has a defined origin point: the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill.
July, 1961. It was a bad time to be an interracial couple in America and an even worse time to be civil rights campaigners and active NAACP members; Betty and Barney were all of the above. We can assume they were feeling a bit apprehensive about returning home from a vacation to Canada on the 19th of September, 1961. An encounter with a UFO can’t have helped.
The story, as told mainly by Betty and recounted breathlessly by the more credible ufologists, goes like this: at around 10:30 PM, Betty spotted what she initially thought was a falling star, only to realize that it was rising instead of falling. She asked Barney to pull over and looked at the point of light through binoculars, which revealed it to be an elongated craft with flashing lights. Barney took a look and initially thought it was a plane, until it started rapidly moving towards them. The Hills piled back into their car and drove away, but the object followed them along a lonely road through New Hampshire’s Franconia Notch.
The craft descended onto the road, blocking the car, and Barney got out. Through the binoculars, he saw several humanoid figures watching him through windows in the craft’s surface. One of them communicated with him telepathically, telling him to “stay where you are and keep looking”. Realizing that the beings were going to try to capture him and Betty, Barney ran back to the car. The craft moved directly overhead and emitted a series of loud beeping and buzzing noises, which put the Hills into a trance-like state. When the fugue lifted and the craft departed, they found that they were thirty-five miles from their last location and couldn’t account for what they had been doing while covering the distance, except for vague memories of encountering a road-block and a “firey orb”.
When the Hills arrived home, still shaken from their encounter, they found a multitude of odd details--torn and damaged clothing, damage to their car and other possessions--whose source they couldn’t remember, as well as strange tingling sensations and out of character behaviour.
On the 21st of September Betty contacted the air force; the resulting investigation dismissed the sighting as a mis-identification of Jupiter (yes, this is partially where that trope comes from). The Hills got a friendlier reception from UFO researcher Walter Webb, who interviewed them and concluded that they were telling the truth. During the interview, Barney stated that there were parts of the encounter he couldn’t remember clearly and theorized that he had repressed the memories.
That might have been the end of the ordeal...but ten days after the incident, Betty had a series of extremely vivid dreams about the encounter, which she began writing about in November (keep that timeline in mind for later). In the dreams, Betty and Barney were taken from their car by small humanoid figures and led, in a fugue-state, into the UFO. From Wikipedia:
The men stood about five feet to five feet four inches tall, and wore matching blue uniforms, with caps similar to those worn by military cadets. They appeared nearly human, with black hair, dark eyes, prominent noses and bluish lips. Their skin was a greyish colour.
In the dreams, Betty, Barney, and the men walked up a ramp into a disc-shaped craft of metallic appearance. Once inside, Barney and Betty were separated. She protested, and was told by a man she called "the leader" that if she and Barney were examined together, it would take much longer to conduct the exams. She and Barney were then taken to separate rooms.
Betty then dreamt that a new man, similar to the others, entered to conduct her exam with the leader. Betty called this new man "the examiner" and said he had a pleasant, calm manner. Though the leader and the examiner spoke to her in English, the examiner's command of the language seemed imperfect and she had difficulty understanding him.
What follows is the stereotypical alien abduction examination, minus the sexual element that often comes into play (that will come later). Betty was able to ask the alien examiner where they came from and tried, unsuccessfully, to take a book written in an unknown alphabet with her. Eventually she and Barney were taken back to their car, where they watched the UFO take off.
Eventually, after two years of more air force investigations and contact with UFO researchers, Betty and Barney underwent hypnosis to recover lost memories. Barney’s hypnotic recollections were highly distressing; he remembered the abduction as a terrifying event and came out with spooky statements like "Oh, those eyes. They're there in my brain". During his examination, the aliens used an instrument to take a sample of his sperm.
Both of the Hills told the same story under hypnosis, agreeing on specific details like the aliens speaking an unknown language which Betty and Barney somehow also understood as English (Barney speculated that the aliens were speaking telepathically, although he was apparently unfamiliar with that specific word). Curiously though, the hypnosis version of events contradicted Betty’s dream account, sometimes on such basic matters as what the aliens looked like and the order of major events during the abduction. Betty’s emotional response was also different: while her dream version of the abduction seemed remarkably calm given the events described, under hypnosis she exhibited severe panic and emotional distress.
Despite the fear they both exhibited, the Hills felt that the hypnosis sessions rid them of their anxiety about the event. The therapist who carried out the sessions, Benjamin Simons, concluded that Barney’s account was a fantasy inspired by Betty’s dreams. Barney came to the opposite conclusion: although he wasn’t as much a true believer as his wife, he started to believe that he and Betty really had been abducted by aliens.
One extremely interesting nugget of information that came out during the hypnosis sessions was a star map drawn by Betty, supposedly based on one she was shown during the abduction. According to her, the map showed solar systems the aliens visited, including the locations of interstellar trade routes. As you’d expect, the “map” was controversial, with UFO believers claiming the placement of stars couldn’t have been an accident while mainstream astronomers (including Carl Sagan) dismissed it as a collection of random dots.
The other noteworthy result of the hypnosis sessions was a more precise physical description of the aliens: small, grey, with large "wrap-around" eyes. Are you picturing a familiar alien archetype? We'll come back to this in a minute.
So, now that we have the basic facts of the story down...what happened? Were the Hills actually abducted by aliens?
Today, if someone claims to have been abducted by a UFO there’s an easy retort for skeptics to deploy: they’re simply copying other abduction accounts either deliberately or subconsciously. Such stories are easy to find and have been thoroughly ingrained into the mass consciousness. Anal probes and people being carried off by beams of light have become so recognizable that they're mostly used for comedy. But we can't brush the Hills case off that easily, because their abduction story is the first one.
Or...is it? While it might be the first alien abduction story, humans have been getting whisked off by supernatural beings for all of recorded history. The entities doing the whisking change according to time and place: our ancient ancestors were left awestruck by encounters with gods, angels and spirits, Europeans from medieval times up until the dawn of the industrial revolution frequently claimed to be spirited away by fairies, and in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when fears of a great war were brewing, "UFOs" were advanced airships piloted by spies from an unknown country. Today, UFOs and aliens have partially been supplanted by encounters with shadowy government entities and sinister black helicopters.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the Hills made up their abduction. At least, not entirely. I think what we're looking at is a combination of a mundane-but-startling event and a great deal of after the fact confabulation.
It's interesting to note that many alien abduction stories take place when the abductee is driving on lonely roads late at night. One theory for why this is so is that the abduction experience is the result of the driver falling asleep at the wheel; while they have a spooky dream, the vehicle rolls on until it eventually drifts off the side of the road and comes to a stop, then the driver wakes up away from where they last remembered being and missing a period of time, haunted by vague memories of strange lights and entities surrounding their car, perhaps not even realizing they were asleep. The UFO abduction hotspots are all in America's vast empty deserts and plains, where long, straight roads with little traffic are features. These are exactly the conditions where someone could fall asleep at the wheel and roll to a gentle stop instead of crashing.
That said, this doesn't entirely apply in the case of the Hills, as they were driving along much twister roads through woodland and as such either of them dozing off behind the wheel would likely have resulted in an instant crash. But they were driving late at night through a lonely area, which fits the overall pattern.
Psychologists analyzing the Hills' case suggested that their ordeal was caused by the stress of being an interracial couple in 1960s America. I think that's too simple an explanation as well as being somewhat patronizing (they were both civil rights activists at a time when that could be fatal and so were presumably used to stress, and they lived in a liberal area where their relationship was apparently accepted), but it is true that they were on a long drive late at night, returning from a vacation. At the very least, they were probably tired. The human mind is more prone to hallucination and confabulation than most people realize; even someone with no history of mental illness can experience one-off "glitches" in mental functioning under the right circumstances.
My best guess for what happened is that the Hills saw something while driving that they couldn't identify. Maybe it was a military plane, maybe it was just the moon observed under strange atmospheric conditions. Hell, maybe it really was Jupiter. Things in the sky can look odd if seen in an unfamiliar way. I've personally seen planes reflect sunlight in such a way that they look like metallic discs. Whatever they saw, I think Betty was probably the main driving force behind working it up into something unusual.
Going back to the timeline of events, Betty's dreams happened ten days after the event, but by her own admission she didn't start writing them down until November and had been mildly obsessed over them during that time. That's plenty of time to both forget the actual contents of the dreams and confabulate them into something more dramatic than they were.
The fact that much of the Hills' concrete details about their abduction came from hypnotic regression is a huge red flag. Repression and later recollection of traumatic memories is real, but the deliberate recovery of repressed memories by a therapist is an extremely controversial practice, as it's very easy for the subject to simply make up "memories" without realizing it (and for the therapist to direct them in doing so, whether deliberately or not).
Lastly, let's go back to the Hills' physical description of the aliens. One of the reasons they were initially given the benefit of the doubt (and why some ufologists still treat them with a measure of credulity to this day) was that they didn't seem to have a pre-existing interest in UFOs or science fiction, or any other subject that would "prime" them to either make up or imagine an abduction. But that was found to not actually be the case.
Several days before the abduction, an episode of The Outer Limits aired that featured this alien creature. Remember how the aliens the Hills saw had grey skin and large eyes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_and_Betty_Hill
Now, you might be thinking that this doesn't look much like the "grey" alien that the Hills' encounter supposedly popularized. But the thing is, the Hills' description of their kidnappers also didn't really sound like the modern grey archetype either; it seems that people took the part about "wrap-around eyes" to mean large and tilted toward the sides of the head and created the grey out of that. But their description does sound a lot like this Outer Limits alien. And remember that spooky shit Barney said about eyes? Here's a line of dialogue form the Outer Limits episode:
"In all the universes, in all the unities beyond the universes, all who have eyes have eyes that speak."
For me, this pretty much clinches it. Whatever really did happen to the Hills on their drive home, their later recollection of it was clearly mixed in with this science fiction imagery and the general interest in UFOs going around at the time (UFO lore is a lot older than most people think--it's often associated with the 80s and 90s, but it became part of modern American culture pretty much right after World War II, when air force pilots flying at higher altitudes for the first time came home with stories of strange lights and mysterious craft, and was bolstered by civilian sightings of top-secret military aircraft during the 50s).
Barney Hill died only eight years after the abduction at the age of 46, of a cerebral hemorrhage (despite what's often claimed in UFO books and articles, there was nothing mysterious or unusual about his death). Betty lived to the age of 85 and in later life became a little...odd, claiming to frequently be visited by UFOs. In this, she became a proto-typical example of the alien "contactee", thereby mainstreaming not one but two major UFO tropes. It's a bit of a shame that she's remembered far more for this than for being a civil rights campaigner.
So what do we think? Spooky or not spooky? I'm going to go with…
The Betty and Barney Hill case is indeed the originator of the UFO abduction experience. It’s also where we find pretty clear examples of the most rational explanations for those experiences.
Office photo by Nastuh Abootalebi on Unsplash (office)