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Sidebar Article To Accompany Stanton Friedman Feature

Betty Hill’s Star Map

By Sean Casteel

            One of the many enduring mysteries of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case is something called “the star map.” Stanton Friedman had a hand in its ultimate authentication, as we will see later in this article. But the story begins during the hypnosis sessions conducted with the Hills by Dr. Benjamin Simon.

 Under hypnosis, Betty relived the moment when she asked the alien leader where he was from.

“She says, ‘I know you’re not from around here,’ which was the understatement of the month,” Friedman said. “And so he shows her—I’ll call it a hologram, a three-dimensional star map—points of light connected with different kinds of lines, to show heavy trade routes, light trade routes, occasional expeditions. So he shows her this thing, and she says, ‘Well, where are you on the map?’ The wise guy alien says, ‘Well, do you know where you are on the map?’ ‘No, I don’t know anything about astronomy.’ She was a social worker, after all. ‘How can I tell you where I’m from if you don’t know where you’re at?’ End of discussion.

“Poor Dr. Simon,” Friedman continued. “He’s got two sensible people, and now Betty’s talking about trade routes, occasional expeditions—what’s going on here? So Simon asked Betty if she could remember what the map looked like. She says yes. He gives her a post-hypnotic suggestion to draw it later on if and only if she can remember it correctly and accurately. She does that.”

Enter Marjorie Fish, who had read John Fuller’s “The Interrupted Journey” but had been doubtful about the Hills’ aliens, feeling that they seemed suspiciously humanoid. But Fish discussed the case with Coral Lorenzen at the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO, at the time a leading UFO study group) and decided to approach Betty about vetting the star map information.

“Marjorie’s plan was to build three-dimensional models,” Friedman explained, “of the stars in our local neighborhood and see if by looking at them from different directions she could find a 3-D pattern that matched the two dimensional pattern that Betty had drawn. Not an easy chore. To make a long story short, she built a total of 26 different three-dimensional models. She used beads strung on nylon fishing line.”

The hard part, according to Friedman, was getting the proper distance data. How far apart from each other were all these stars?

“The distance data was in pretty poor shape back then,” Freidman said. “You look at five different star catalogs and you get five different distances.”

Then finally a new catalog, Wilhelm Gliese’s “Catalog of Nearby Stars,” with the best distance data ever compiled, was published. Fish rebuilt one of the models she had done earlier and, voila, there was the pattern.

APRO’s Lorenzen had previously asked Friedman to help with the star map investigation process, and he was on the scene when Fish presented her findings to Dr. J. Allen Hynek at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and at a MUFON conference in the early 1970s. Friedman also wrote the first article published on the star map work, which appeared in the now defunct “Saga Magazine.” He then convinced the editor of “Astronomy Magazine,” Terrence Dickinson, to write an article of his own.

Dickinson spoke to Fish and the resulting article received more reader reaction than anything “Astronomy Magazine” had published before or since. Among those weighing in in opposition to the star map was Carl Sagan, who threatened to sue when his name was included on the cover of a 32-page booklet that reprinted Dickinson’s original article and the spirited debate that followed it in later issues. 

In any case, the booklet quickly sold over 10,000 copies, which Friedman said was unheard of for such an undertaking. And just what was causing all that fuss?

“The crucial part of Marjorie Fish’s work,” Friedman said, “was the identification of the stars on Betty’s map. The base stars were Zeta One and Zeta Two Reticuli. That’s the constellation of Reticulum, which means ‘The Net’ in Latin. All the stars connected with lines are sun-like stars, even though only five percent of the stars in the local neighborhood are sun-like stars. And all the sun-like stars in this very well defined, three-dimensional volume of space are part of the map. So you’ve got all the right kind and only the right kind.

“Now, by sun-like,” he continued, “I mean not too hot, not too cold, not too old, not too new, not too close to another star, not varying in energy output—a lot of criteria here. Not only are all the stars the right kind for planets and life, but the patterned stars are in a plane, like thin slices of pepperoni on a big but thin pizza, as opposed to say raisins in a big fat loaf of raisin bread. This is very important. A, it wasn’t known before this work, and B, it makes it easier to travel in a plane, if you don’t have to get out of the plane. The planets in our own solar system are pretty close to being in a plane, not helter-skelter all over the place.”

The two stars, Zeta One and Zeta Two Reticuli, are 39.2 light years away from earth. 

“Which is just down the street,” Freidman said. “We’re talking about a little chunk of our local galaxy.”

Meanwhile, Zeta One and Zeta Two are only an eighth of a light year apart from each other.

“From a planet around one looking at the other,” Friedman said, “it doesn’t matter which direction you look, the other star is visible all day long, which would be quite remarkable. In addition, you could directly observe planets easily from a planet around one looking over at the other because they’re so close. And you could very quickly determine whether there was biological life because that affects the composition of the atmosphere around the planets.”

Both the Zeta stars are a billion years older than the sun, Friedman reasoned, so one would expect the locals there to have technology currently unknown here on Earth.

“Furthermore,” he said, “there would be far more incentive to develop interstellar travel when you’ve got a next door neighbor, as opposed to our situation of being out here in the boondocks.

“And so a remarkable piece of work from Marjorie Fish,” Friedman said. “That’s part of what I dealt with in the book, the attacks on the work originally when the ‘Astronomy Magazine’ piece came out. Every single critic misrepresented what Marjorie did and how she did it. That includes Carl Sagan, which is unfortunate. But it’s standard practice for UFO debunkers. ‘Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind’s made up. What the public doesn’t know, I’m not going to tell them. If you can’t attack the data, attack the people, and do your research by proclamation. Investigation is too much trouble.’ So that’s what the skeptics did.”

THE END