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This article was the cover story for the October 2007 issue of “UFO Magazine,” located at www.ufomag.com By Sean Casteel The story of Betty and Barney Hill’s 1961 encounter with a landed UFO and its occupants is popularly assumed to be the first documented case of alien abduction in the modern era. While other abduction events may have preceded the Hill’s experience chronologically, having been retrieved by regressive hypnosis—there are cases of abduction going back to the 1930s, according to some present day researchers—the Hills’ case remains the first time news of an abduction reached the general public in a meaningful way. It also caused the UFO community to sit up and take stock of its earlier beliefs about occupant reports being the fanciful stuff of contactees and others of doubtful veracity. A series of articles appeared in “Look Magazine” in 1965 and a book on the Hills’ experience, called “The Interrupted Journey,” was a national bestseller the following year, both the work of journalist and author John Fuller. Fuller’s book stood as the essential, classic last word on the subject for decades, until the recent publication of “Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience” (New Page Books, 2007) by Stanton T. Friedman and Betty’s niece Kathleen Marden. The new book relies hardly at all on John Fuller’s work and presents a great deal of new information brought to the reading public for the first time.
Stanton Friedman is best known as a pioneering researcher of the
Roswell Incident and the MJ-12 documents, having authored landmark books
on both subjects, “Crash At Corona: The Definitive Study of the
Roswell Incident” and “Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and
the United States Government’s UFO Cover-Up.” He also holds a
master’s degree in physics from the But it is Friedman’s work on the Betty and Barney Hill case that is his most recent offering to the collective UFO database. He has told the Hills’ story many times, and does so again here.
“Betty was a white social worker in
“They had thought about staying overnight,” Friedman
continued, “and then they heard there was a hurricane heading toward Thus the stage is set, as it so often is, with a lone car on a stretch of deserted road.
“Betty saw this thing in the sky,” Friedman said, “and she
watched it for a while, saw it through binoculars and told Barney. He
was dismissive. You know, it must be an airplane, a Piper Cub. A
helicopter. She keeps watching it. It can’t be that. Look how it’s
moving. Look at the lighting. They stopped a couple of times to look at
this thing. Barney saw it through the binoculars, close up. He got out
of the car. This is late at night, “So they had stopped the car,” he went on, “and Barney was beginning to feel very threatened because he saw beings inside. There was a double row of windows on this craft, which was sitting less than a hundred feet away. It was like whoever he was looking at had a lock on him. ‘Stay put, it’s all right, we’re not going to hurt you.’ Barney felt very concerned about being captured, dashed back to the car, they take off again. It’s beginning to be a rather disturbing experience. He’s asking Betty, ‘Can you see it? Where is it? What’s going on?’” As the couple continued their drive home, Friedman said that Barney made turns that defied any normal logic. “He was heading down the main route, north to south in New Hampshire, got off the main highway, got on to a secondary highway, and then made a third turn onto a tertiary highway, a dirt road, basically. And they stopped. There was something in the road ahead. They had to be controlling what Barney was doing from a distance, mentally, because he would otherwise never have done this. That’s kind of a neat thing, to be able to control somebody’s actions from a distance, without putting a gun to their head or a knife to their throat.” At this point, the couple is taken from their vehicle and led toward the UFO in the clearing nearby. They see a ramp, and are virtually dragged into the ship “Barney is under tighter control than Betty,” Friedman said. “He had a gun in his pocket. He was more threatened than she was. They were taken onboard, put in separate rooms and examined—like examining a specimen, a ‘be kind to dumb animals’ kind of thing. Betty had a needle stuck in her navel, supposedly a pregnancy test, which sounds very much like what we today would all amniocentesis. But nobody knew how to do that back then in ’61.” At one point in the experience, Betty asks one of the aliens if she can have a souvenir to take with her, to prove that all this has been real. “The guy lets her take a book,” Friedman said. “These beings were humanoid, two arms, two legs, a head and a body. Sufficiently different so you know they weren’t from around here, but they weren’t monsters. They take back the book, and say ‘We’ve decided you won’t remember what happened.’ And Betty’s screaming, ‘I will, too!’ She had the last laugh on that, although it took several years. “Anyway, they’re put back in the car, there’s some beeping sounds, then another set of beeping sounds—strange indications of something happening. They think these are coming from the trunk of the car. What’s going on here? There’s a lot of confusion.”
When the Hills arrived home, they realized that both of their
watches had stopped, and it was much later than they expected it to be.
They had thought they would be home around The following day, Betty called her sister and told her about their strange encounter. They next phoned the police, who advised them to report the sighting to nearby Pease Air Force Base. The Air Force took the report quite seriously. Betty talked to an officer there, who informed her that there had been an anomalous radar sighting at the same time as the Hills’ encounter. “Life went on,” Friedman said. “Betty had some dreams about seemingly being abducted by strange beings. She wrote them down.”
Betty did a little research on her own as well. She went to the
public library and checked out a book by Major Donald Keyhoe, a leading
UFO researcher of the era. The book included the address of the National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), for people to
write and report their sightings and experiences. Betty wrote to the
address and the Hills were soon visited by Walter Webb, then the NICAP
representative for “But it wasn’t until more than two years later,” Friedman said, “when Barney developed an ulcer—and pretty soon it had gotten so he couldn’t work—and his doctor was saying, ‘Look, I’ve tried all the medical stuff, and we’re not getting anywhere. Barney, I think you should see a psychiatrist.’”
Barney was referred to Dr. Benjamin Simon in “Now, Simon knew nothing about flying saucers,” Friedman explained, “but he had developed a technique toward the end of World War II for treating veterans with a shell shock problem. We call it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder today. You know, battlefield situations can be very tough on people. Using medical hypnosis, very deep hypnosis, inducing amnesia after each session, having them relive an experience that has given them trouble. Dr. Simon had a very high success rate. I’ve seen the movie, ‘Let There Be Light,’ that was made by the government with Dr. Simon, showing his techniques and how he helped the war veterans. “So they had a period of several months in early 1964,” Friedman continued, “when they went in every Saturday morning. Dr. Simon would hypnotize Barney, have him relive a portion of the experience, tape it, induce amnesia, send him out, then bring Betty in to do the same thing with her. Neither of them knowing what’s going on in these sessions. Of course, he would calm them down after each session. Some of them were very intense emotionally. Dr. Simon even put in writing that the intensity of their emotions on occasions was so great that he had to stop a couple of the sessions, and was greater than anything he’d seen with the veterans. Which is a pretty strong statement, coming from Dr. Simon.” The Hills basically endured what has come to be called the standard abduction scenario of intrusive medical examination that leaves behind fragmented memories. Much of it has already been written about by the aforementioned John Fuller in his articles and “The Interrupted Journey.” Friedman recounted how the Hills’ story first reached the public. “They weren’t looking for publicity at all,” Friedman said. “Somebody had made a tape of a little talk they gave to a church group and then gave it to a reporter, who then wanted to interview the Hills. They didn’t want any part of it. They were afraid of losing their jobs. They tried to get legal advice. Is there some way to stop this reporter from doing it? They couldn’t. So a series of articles appeared in The Boston Traveler newspaper, and much to their amazement, the response from all over the world was very good.” It was at that point that John Fuller approached the Hills. An agreement was worked out between Betty and Barney, Dr. Simon and Fuller. “You can see how rough Simon was on John Fuller,” Friedman said, “by looking at his notations on the manuscripts that are down at the Boston University Archives. I’ve seen those, and he pulled no punches. He didn’t want anything that would embarrass him or the Hills. A fine book was done.” Friedman went on to explain why the book he has coauthored with Kathleen Marden has taken an entirely different route to the truth. “What’s different in the new book,” he said, “is that John Fuller only listened to a question once. He couldn’t use all the material from the tapes—there was an awful lot of it—and that wasn’t his major concern. What has happened here is that Kathleen transcribed all the tapes, and found that Simon asked the same questions several different ways and at different times to try to bring out different aspects of what went on. She also discovered that Simon was making every possible effort to convince Barney that there wasn’t an abduction, that this was just Betty’s dreams somehow impacting on him. “And Kathleen has compared directly Betty’s notes on her dreams and then what came out under hypnosis for Betty and Barney. Certainly Barney’s experience was different from what Betty dreamt. Now, where there were common situations, their recollections jibe, no question about it. How many aliens there were when they got out of the car, and how they got into the craft and how they went back out and so forth. It’s an exciting review of the story that enabled a lot of people to come forward and talk about their abduction case.” And come forward they would, many times over the ensuing decades. We now have documented cases of abduction from around the world. But Friedman maintains that the Hills’ case continues to be a crucial one. “One of the big things that distinguishes the Hills,” Friedman said, “is that they had Dr. Simon doing the hypnosis, medical hypnosis. That’s the first thing. Second, a real expert in extracting truth. Third, an awful lot of sessions. So we have far more detail, objective, carefully achieved detail, about what things were like onboard the craft. Everything from that strange little story where the aliens come rushing in and start pulling on Betty’s teeth, and she’s asking, ‘What’s going on here?’ Well, they don’t understand why Barney’s teeth come out and hers didn’t. You know, it’s a cute little separate thing. “The fact that they decided in sort of a democratic way to not let Betty keep the book,” he continued. “That tells you something. It wasn’t an autocrat who made all of the decisions, but apparently there was some group activity there. They seemed intent on not hurting. They tried to avoid causing pain. They were out to do a job. The ‘doctor’ was surprised that when he stuck the needle into Betty’s navel that it hurt. He stopped the pain slowly, waved his hand, and she was grateful for that. “But in other words, the aliens didn’t run roughshod over the Hills. Now, many other hypnosis sessions aren’t done as carefully as Dr. Simon did his, or as deeply. And with these repeated questions from different directions. But there’s a consistent picture here. We are specimens to be examined. When I was in high school biology, I cut up a frog. That was an educational experience. I had nothing against the frog. So we don’t know a lot, but we do know that the Hills were examined and probed and poked. And certainly the Hills didn’t have a model to report an experience, based on someone else’s experience, because there hadn’t been one reported. Everybody else, you’ve got to be a little careful.” There is a further reason to trust in the objectivity of Dr. Simon’s work with the Hills—he did nothing to prejudice their beliefs. “It’s kind of funny,” Friedman said, “how the noisy negativists will critique the hypnotists, whether it’s Budd Hopkins or David Jacobs or whatever, and try to imply that they’re just putting their vision of what goes on into the minds of the abductees. Well, in this situation, we have exactly the opposite. We have the psychiatrist trying to steer them away from an abduction. “Dr. Simon had a friend who was a military guy—Simon had been in the military himself—who told him there was nothing to flying saucers. Simon was really concerned about being associated with something that was as strange as a UFO abduction. So in this case, and you won’t hear the critics complain, he was doing his darnedest to steer them away from an alien abduction scenario, which is kind of intriguing. But nobody can say that Simon was biased in that direction, because he sure as heck wasn’t.”
While Friedman’s best known work so far has dealt with “One is that it’s clearly an indication,” he said, “that they are interested in something about us. Now, whether it’s collecting DNA or creating hybrids, I have no idea. There have been cases where people have been basically rejected because they were sterile, and no longer of interest to them apparently. I certainly don’t believe everybody who comes down the pike and screams, ‘I was abducted!’ But I have a lot of confidence in the work of Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, although I may not agree with them all of the time.” But why were Betty and Barney Hill chosen by the alien abductors? Was it merely a random accident?
“There’s no question that they were active in their
community,” Friedman said, “that they were well thought of, that
they’d been around. Two very different people who obviously had
courage or they couldn’t have gotten married in the first place. A
black man and a white woman in Friedman acted as a consultant to Universal Studios on the 1975 made-for-television movie “The UFO Incident,” in which actor James Earl Jones played Barney, Estelle Parsons played Betty and Bernard Hughes played Dr. Simon. That was the first time in the history of television that a black man and white woman were seen in bed together. “So it tells you the world was a different place back then,” Friedman said. “I always imagine a conversation between the leader and the alien doctor, saying, ‘Hey, you need more specimens tonight, Joe?’ ‘Yeah, I could use a couple. Do you see anybody around?’ ‘Well, not many vehicles down there. Oh, there’s one over there. Let’s crank up the machinery. Oh, a man and a woman. That’s good. A black man, white woman. That’s even better. You want them?’ ‘Yeah, let’s go get them.’ So, random is wrong place, wrong time, if you will.” Barney died in 1969, leaving behind a legacy of devotion to civil rights and political activism. He had served as Legal Redress for the NAACP, as well as being appointed to the State Advisory Board for the Office of Economic Opportunity and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Together with Betty, he was a founding member of the Rockingham Community Action Program. Betty passed away in 2004. “Betty did go through a period of time,” Friedman said, “where she didn’t have Barney to support her. Some people gave her a rough time. As you know, people in the UFO movement can be very nasty and unpleasant. Also, Betty wasn’t a scientist. She did her own investigations, but I remember once she had taken a bunch of pictures with a Polaroid of things zipping around in the sky at night. “Well, I asked her if she knew how long the shutter was open, and she didn’t know anything about the camera. I checked with Polaroid, and that model is often used by artists, handheld, with a light in the distance. You move the camera around and you get beautiful patterns and traces and so forth. The UFOs weren’t moving around, but she was interpreting it that way. So she saw too many UFOs, and she had her places where she thought, ‘Those lights over there must have been UFOs.’” Friedman has high praise for his coauthor, Kathleen Marden, Betty’s niece. “To Kathleen’s credit,” he said, “she shows Betty warts and all. She was a real person. I’m so pleased to have been connected with Kathleen on this. She’s done a wonderful job. Many people don’t realize that she’s been active in Ufology for more than a decade. She was the final examiner of people trying to be UFO investigators for MUFON. She’s not a newcomer, and she’s not just a relative painting a lovely picture to write a book. It’s a detailed, careful book, or I wouldn’t have been connected with it. “We tried to put it all out there,” Friedman said, “with Kathleen’s comparative analysis, with the other attacks on UFO abductions. I see no reason to be an apologist Ufologist. If you’ve got the facts, if you do your homework, get out of your armchair, go to the archives, etc., then why be hesitant to tell it like it is? “And again, I think everybody in Ufology owes Kathleen a debt for transcribing all those tapes, for getting out the real picture of what went on, and helping us to turn a new page about not only the Hill case, but other abductions, by inference. The stories aren’t as far out as some people want to think they are.”
[To purchase “Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO
Experience” directly from Kathleen Marden, send a check or money order
for $18.99 to her at Also, visit Sean Casteel’s website at www.seancasteel.com Casteel is the author of “UFOs, Prophecy and the End of Time,” “Signs and Symbols of the Second Coming,” and “The Excluded Books of the Bible,” available for purchase at his website as well as at Amazon.com and Filament Books.] THE END
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