May 5, 2020 • 36 mins
Betty Hill had a series of intense dreams after her UFO encounter. How did these dreams inform the memories recovered during hypnosis sessions two years later? They way the Hills described the aliens they met changed over time, becoming less human. Why did the descriptions change and how did they finally arrive at a definitive answer to what these creatures looked like?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankie. I'm Dudley Dudley. I
live in Durham, Hampshire, and many years ago I lived
in Greenland, New Hampshire, which is just outside of Portsmouth
and Exeter. While I was living there with my husband
(00:25):
and children, we joined a group called Seacoast Council on
Religion and Race. It was in the early sixties and
among the other people who were members of that group
there was a couple Partey in Betty Hill. I got
to know them rather well and invited them to dinner
(00:46):
one night. And after dinner we were sitting in the
living room just talking generalities, and all of a sudden,
out of absolutely nowhere, Barney started to tell the story
of something that had happened to them, oh maybe six
months or eight months earlier. It was the story of
(01:11):
their abduction by aliens. It was jaw dropping. I mean,
it was nothing that I had any reason to believe
apart from there saying it. But I mean there's been
no clues whatsoever. Nobody had whispered about. You know, Barney
and Betty had this adventure. They just started to talk,
(01:35):
and it was compelling. They talked about driving in their
car and coming down the highway and seeing lights flashing.
Somehow the lights urged them to pull over from there.
In their telling of the story, it developed into their
(01:56):
being taken out of the car and into I guess
the spaceship and physically examined. Betty sort of laughed about it,
saying that she figured later that they went back up
into the heavens of wherever from whence they had come,
(02:18):
And we're reporting to their boss of the creatures on
Earth that the male of the species is black, the
female is white, and the offspring is this little sauce
and shaped brown what what we know as a dog.
In their separate hypnosis sessions, Betty and Barney Hill told
(02:42):
remarkably similar stories about being abducted and brought aboard an
alien spacecraft. Last episode, we looked at what we now
know about memory and hypnosis. Simply put, the stories they
told while under hypnosis can't be regarded as an accurate
recall of a real event. But if the abduction didn't happen,
(03:05):
how were their stories so similar? I'm Toby Ball, This
is strange. Arrivals Episode six, Jr. At the time of
(03:28):
their hypnosis sessions in Dr Benjamin Simon believed that the
source material was Betty's dreams can nights after this happened,
I had a series of dreams for five nights. Each
dream is different, which later I found I was a
recall of what it happened, and the dreams were depicting
(03:49):
what you just described to me at that point. What
do you do? Where? When is it? Is it starting?
Is Bonnie trouble by all of this is Bonnie as
his life pattern change? Has his mood changed at all?
Actually the first thing I did, but each during the
next day I wrote down what I could remember my
(04:10):
dream the following day, which would be and every time
I had after So we're talking, and I wrote, I
made a record on the thirty eight years to the day,
and then I took and quote him away. And then
later several months later, I talked to my supervise about
(04:34):
the meaning of dreams and that she said, well, maybe
it happened. That was Betty Hill talking with folklorist John
Horrigan during their hypnosis sessions. Betty told Dr Simon about
the nightmares that she had had over the course of
(04:56):
five nights after the UFO encounter. Dr Simon new Barney
had suffered from anxiety prior to the encounter, but Betty
didn't seem to have a similar prior psychological issue. Working
on the assumption that the abduction had not literally occurred,
he wondered if maybe these dreams had some connection to
(05:18):
distress she was showing under hypnosis as we heard last week.
He also began to wonder if she had been telling
Barney the details of these dreams. Could that be why
his story matched hers. He asked her if she had
talked to anyone about her dreams. This is Dr Simon
(05:38):
on the Larry Glick radio show. In she said, oh, yes,
my supervisor, my sister when we got to work with
some home and have tea together, and I told her
might be And she said that it was my supervisor
who said, Betty, how you know all these how do
(06:01):
you know it isn't true? This is planning the scene. Now,
that had to be true. Not only had she told
someone about her dreams, that person had suggested the possibility
that they were more than dreams, that maybe they were memories.
She also told them that the dreams had been so
(06:22):
remarkable that she had written them down. Dr Simon recognized
this as a great opportunity, so I directed her to
bring in her dreams, that she would find them and
bring them in the next session. She brought them and
they were fully typed up by herself at the time
they occurred. That's where you important one. In November, less
(06:49):
than two months after their encounter with the UFO, Betty
Hill wrote an account of her dreams in a document
titled Dreams or Recall. She began this document by writing
that she was going to describe her dreams in chronological
order of the story, which was not the order she
had dreamt them in. With a few minor discrepancies. She
(07:13):
related the same story that she had told under hypnosis,
the turn off the main highway, the figures in the road,
the experience on the spacecraft, even Barney's dentures, and the
discussion about squash. It is, in all important ways indistinguishable
(07:33):
from the story she told under hypnosis and on a camp.
From inspection of that, with her story, they were exactly
alike with one difference. But in the dreams she went
up told the r hampstanding being embodiable. That's all. They
were exactly alone and still were not accept fully that
(07:57):
they were the same. There was another discrepancy that we
will look at it in a few minutes. But Dr
Simon was struck not only by the nearly identical stories,
but also by the way that her hypnotically recovered story
seemed to reflect a kind of dream logic. By the way,
(08:18):
when I say dreams without not only referring facts she
had read, that she'd written them down, but the whole
structure of the story was out of a dream. There
many contradictures inconsistent with a perfect or righted dream. In fact,
they're part of the nature of dreams. And so this
thing was clearly filled out from me, the concept of
the dream by a lot of inner materials dreams. Her
(08:41):
recall was for Dr Simon the key to the whole
abduction narrative. That gave me an answer at that fact
that the fantastic story was her dreams, and we could
hit that check very well with reality. So I was satisfied.
(09:07):
I didn't have to look any further for us exclamation,
I wouldn't have to accept them. But connections they existed
of space describe whatever they were. There is no question
that her dreams and her hypnosis testimony are the same
story told with very minor variations. This can be explained
(09:31):
in two different ways. The first is the explanation that
Dr Simon preferred Betty had these intense dreams and told
Barney and others about them. When they eventually were hypnotized,
Betty related her dreams, and Barney told what he imagined
his experience would have been based on what he'd heard
(09:52):
about her dreams. Is it plausible that Betty's string of
dreams were caused by the u f O citing on
the night of September I definitely wouldn't say that there's
a reason to believe that something that you've dreamed bears
a straightforward relationship to something that happened in real life.
(10:12):
They're usually related to something that's happening in your real life,
but they're often sort of mixing together different elements. So
it might take a feeling that you've had, maybe you
haven't recognized and kind of dramatized it in a story.
I'm Alice rob and I'm the author of the book
Why We Dream. The dreams that people tend to talk
(10:34):
about and tell their friends about are the more dramatic ones,
and of course those do happen. The reason that we
have those crazy dreams is that when we're dreaming, our
brain is in this different state where the emotion centers
of our brain are very activated, but the rational centers
that usually would keep those emotions in check are more dormant.
(11:01):
So it is consistent with our understanding of how dreams
work that Betty would have nightmares that made a story
out of the anxiety she felt during their UFO encounter
in the White Mountains. The other possibility is that Betty's
dreams were her mind's way of bringing to the surface
events that had happened the night of the encounter, memories
(11:24):
that the alien abductors had somehow caused her and Barney
to forget. If this was the case, the hypnosis sessions
were uncovering actual memories of their abduction. Even if the
hypnotically recalled stories weren't exactly what happened in every detail,
the basic fact that they were brought aboard of spacecraft
(11:45):
was confirmed. That's the argument if you believe the abduction
story is real. I asked Alice rob if there was
any research about whether dreams could conjure up memories that
people had lost. Through him Nisia. The only piece of
research I can think of that involves dreams of people
(12:06):
with amnesia was this study about twenty years ago by
Robert Stickold, who was studying dreams and memory consolidation. This
is one of the first real scientific studies of dreams.
He had people come into his lab and played Tetris
for hours and then had them report their dreams and
(12:26):
found that they would have dreams of Tatris, or dreams
of tiles, or dreams that were sort of influenced by
the game. So he included some regular, healthy undergraduates, and
he also included some patients with amnesia. These were people
with no short term memory. They were unable to remember
things that had happened even just hours before. It was
(12:49):
a small sample. It was only I think six or
seven people, so I wouldn't want to read too too
much into this, but they did have elements of the
game in their dreams, even if they couldn't consciously remember,
like the rules. They would have to relearn how to
play Tetris every time. As Alice said, you can only
(13:12):
put so much stock in a study of this size,
but there is an indication that someone might be able
to recall things in a dream that were lost due
to amnesia. But again, as with any dream, it's not
going to be a replay of actual events. Like hypnosis.
It's a more complicated process. And it's not that surprising
(13:35):
that Betty would think that her dreams were a recall
of an actual event, and that those dreams would eventually
function essentially as memories. There's plenty of history of people
giving great significance to their dreams. I think dreams absolutely
can affect how we remember things. I mean, dreams can
(13:55):
be such powerful and emotional and lifelike experiences in ways
that science can't fully explain. It makes sense to wonder
sort of where they came from, and there are lots
of examples of people undergoing religious conversions or changing their
beliefs after powerful dreams. To me, it seems likely that
(14:16):
Dr Simon's instinct was correct. Betty had dreams that were
a reaction to her experience in the White Mountains, then
under hypnosis, she recalled those dreams as if they had
actually happened. This fits with what we know about dreams.
On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any
(14:38):
scientific evidence that dreams can recall lost memories In the
vivid detail that Betty's described, but there are some discrepancies
in the details of Betty's dreams, Betty's and Barney's hypnosis testimony,
and their later memories. These are most noticeable in the
way the descriptions of the aliens changed over time. After
(15:01):
the break, strange arrivals will return. In a moment. Take
(15:21):
a second and bring up a mental image of an alien.
Most people will probably think of something like this small body,
big head, with an enlarged cranium, as if to accommodate
a huge brain, oversized oval or catlike eyes, diminished nose
(15:41):
and mouth, no ears to speak of. This description is
what people in the UFO community call a gray. Popular
culture has settled on Gray's is what aliens look like.
Think close encounters of the third kind. This conception originates
(16:02):
at least in part with the Hills description of the
aliens they encountered, but they didn't initially describe the beings
they encountered in this way. Their description changed as time
went on. This is from Betty and Barney's ninety six
appearance on the Alan Douglas Show. What was the dream
(16:23):
like that you, gentlemen? Well, actually, so we found out
right that my dreams were very, very similar. There's the
information that we have changed. There were some minor differences,
and I think probably the most important difference is that
(16:45):
in my dream I may see I guess said um,
and I say, more human then they were in dreams
or recall. This is how she describes the alien. During
this time, I became conscious of several things. First, only
(17:06):
one man speaks in English, with a foreign accent, but
very understandable. The others say nothing. I note their physical appearance.
Most of the men are my height, although I cannot
remember the height of the heels on my shoes. None
(17:27):
are as tall as Marnie, so I would judge them
to be five ft to five ft four inches. Their
chests are larger than ours. The noses were larger, longer
than the average size, though I have seen people with
noses like theirs, like Jimmy Durranty's. Their complexions were of
(17:52):
a great tone, like a great paint with black bass.
Their lips were of a bluish tin. Hair and eyes
were very dark, possibly black. And the men were all
dressed alike, presumably in uniform of a light navy blue
color with a gray shade to it. They wore trousers
(18:16):
and short jackets that gave the appearance of zippert sport jackets,
but I am not aware of zippers or buttons for closing.
Shoes were a low slip on style resembling a boot.
I cannot remember any jewelry or insignia. They were all
wearing a military cap similar to Air Force, but not
(18:40):
so broad on top. They were very human in appearance,
not frightening. But this was not how she would describe
them in her hypnosis sessions. Later, in response to a
written question, apparently trying to address this discrepancy, she wrote
the following reply, Her description is in keeping with the
(19:03):
standards of the mid nineties sixties, but it's a little
jarring to hear today. In my dreams, I felt I
made the humanoids more like us than they really were.
Under hypnosis, I described them as mongoloid, a certain type
of retardation, with broad, flat faces, large slanting eyes, small
(19:27):
flattened nose. Their body seemed out of proportion with their
larger chest areas. Barney too initially described the beings as
looking close to human, but as time passed this also changed.
(19:48):
His first glimpse of the aliens came during the encounter
at Indian Head when he sees the occupants of the
craft looking out at him through the bank of windows.
There are the roll of windows, rolls windows, just a
huge row of windows. Barney describes the saucer occupants in
(20:10):
a way that to him conjures menace. Would you see
clearly yes to his face like that, I can think
of his round, I think of you read him Irishman.
As an African American working in Boston in the late
(20:30):
fifties and early sixties, he associated the Irish with racist hostility.
He's surprised that this quote unquote Irishman seems friendly. I
don't know why. I think I know why because Irish
(20:54):
are usually hostile to new grow and when I see
my friend Gus person, I react to it, I thinking
I will be from me. He focuses on another figure two,
one that seems more sinister. I think this one that
(21:19):
is looking over the children, the evil face exactly. Barney
had enlisted in the Army during World War Two. The
Nazi figure is another symbol of threat. I'm going to
(21:39):
see these figures that clearly about distance. I was looking
at him with the Marcos Oh I think it's safe
to say that his descriptions here while under hypnosis are
probably reflective of his emotional reaction, not his visual perception.
(21:59):
I as we have heard, Barney kept his eyes tightly
shut for most of his time on the craft, but
he did open them briefly while he was being examined
on the table. I saw this kind of grayish color,
and this is I think, because most people they're not.
We saw a little green men. And they were not
green men. They were a grayish, metallic kind of gray
(22:24):
in color. And I might also say that I'm quite
sure they were not wearing a mask, rather any kind
of apparatus over the head for breathing purposes, because I
could see what would have been out a thin line
without a lip muffle that when potty when opened, there
was a membrane inside that fluttered really red at the
(22:50):
end of the mouth the towel, and this fluttered. And
this seemed to be a way that they communicated with
one another with a very peculiar kind of bumbling. Uh.
This description maintains the threatening feel of Barney's earlier descriptions
of the Irishman in the Nazi, but this being is
clearly not human, and unlike the beings Betty described in
(23:14):
earlier episodes, Barney's doesn't seem likely to exchange and friendly banter.
Betty and Barney worked with a new Hampshire artist named
David Baker to create drawings of the aliens. Baker wrote
the Hills a letter on October two. It seems that
(23:35):
he had shown them preliminary sketches and they had apparently
been dissatisfied. In the letter, he tries to address their objections,
and I think it gives some insights into their perceptions
of the aliens. He writes eyes slanted opening, rounding sides
of face, indicating peripheral vision. Anatomy for such eyes would
(23:58):
indicate bone structure or to protect such in large eyeballs
as indicated, would extend cheekbones, round curve of ron facial plate,
giving a look to eyes, if not so much oriental
as like a cat's eyes. Someone, maybe Betty, has written
yes in the margin next to this observation. Baker, probably
(24:21):
referring to Barney's description of a membrane in one of
the aliens mouths, theorizes that the aliens might be wearing
some kind of protective film that would distort their features,
much like a bank robber wearing a stocking over his head,
pushing his nose flat, pulling his mouth tight, and blurring
facial details. This theory is met simply with a question mark.
(24:47):
Baker's completed drawings are held at the Milne Special Collections
and Archives at the University of New Hampshire. They portray
what you'd expect, strange figures with large eyes, clad in
the garb that Betty and Barney described, caps, scarves, jackets. Intriguingly,
(25:08):
there's also a haziness to the images is if visually
representing the uncertain process of recall. When you consider that
this is an attempt to portray beings that they considered
to be real, the sketches are pretty eerie, But there's
something else in the archive. The Betty and Barney Hill
(25:29):
papers are spread among some fourteen boxes. Most of the
boxes hold some combination of papers, photographs, and documents. Oversized
Box four, though, holds a very strange artifact, the sculpture
of an alien bust. It's called JR. As best as
(25:51):
they've been able to figure out, it's made of some
kind of resin molded over a window screen core. It's
putty colored with a hint of green. Believe it or not,
this bus was sculpted by Marjorie Fish, the same Marjorie
Fish who constructed the models that pointed to Zeta reticuli
(26:11):
as the origin of the star map. She sculpted the
bust based on David Baker's drawings as well as her own,
which she also made in consultation with Betty. Contrasted to
Baker's drawings, marjorie sketches are very clear and simple, like
something you'd see in a well drawn comic book. To
(26:31):
see Junior in person is jarring. It has a presence.
Here's Betty showing Junior to John Horrigan during the interview.
This is Junior. Now. This is a casado composit of
the individual differences. They do not look alike. There's as
much different between among them is there is any group
(26:55):
of people. But this basically shows a characteristics allowed your eyes, nose, mouth,
no protruding pot No, but this one this is because
he fell off the podium in St. Louis. Okay. So
Buddy's okay though, but he hasn't pronounced brown Ridge. Yeah. Um,
as you said, a pug knows um more or less
(27:18):
a very small orifice for a mouth, and actually, instead
of white's actually have yellow eyes and eyes I see
irishes and pupil. We put the yellow in Okay to
emphasize him. I was gonna say he needs vizine or
or he looks like he has malaria, but okay, okay.
Now Junior has been evaluated by I don't know how
(27:40):
many physical anthropologists, but what he looks like now, if
we continue along the path of evolution, this is what
we're going to look like in years. Junior looks like
an early prototype of a gray It's cranium is enlarged,
but not as much as you'd expect. The eyes are
(28:01):
big and somewhat at an angle, but again not as
exaggerated is what we're used to now. Also, the eyes
have gray irises, black pupils, and as you just heard,
the whites of the eyes are a kind of lemon yellow.
The nose and mouth are barely there. The mouth is
just four lines etched into the face. It makes me
(28:25):
wonder if maybe this was more of a product of
what she quote unquote remembered most about the aliens instead
of what they looked like. The eyes had drawn her
the rest of the face was an afterthought. Betty would
later claim that the grays that we think of now
were not what she saw. Let's just go back to
(28:46):
those type of entities. Um, they were your classic alien,
gray shaped cat like No, no, they weren't. Okay, human
being there were, there are a form of human beings.
Did they have cat like or chestire like eyes? They
had larger eyes than ours, smaller nose, a smaller mouth,
no protruding part of the era. Noa nothing like these
(29:11):
classic grays. You see your Whitley streamers. Da, I'll never
say nos. I don't know what the okay she said.
What she saw was closer in appearance to a tribe
of indigenous people living near Antarctica that she learned about
at a presentation she attended an Exeter, New Hampshire. Junior
in fact, looks to be some kind of midpoint between
(29:33):
a human and the stereotypical gray alien. I understand her
point that what she saw isn't exactly what we think
of now, but her description of the aliens as shown
by Junior is an important step in creating the public
understanding of what an alien looks like. The question that
(29:53):
this begs is if they didn't have an actual encounter.
Where did they get this idea of an aliens appearance?
Well maybe from TV skeptoid host Brian Dunning. So for
a long time the people have been pointing to this
episode of The Outer Limits called the Bollerro Shield as
(30:15):
probably what inspired Barney Hill's description under hypnosis of what
these alien characters look like, because it came out at
the right time that it's it's likely that he would
have seen this on TV or possible anyway, and there
wasn't really anything else in popular culture that might have
informed his idea of what an alien would look like
(30:35):
besides this. I mean, you could just do a Google
search for the Bollerro Shield and you'll see what this
alien looks like, and it's like, yeah, it looks kind
of alien like, but it doesn't really look all that
much like our concept of what we think of as
a gray alien today. The Bolerro Shield episode of The
Outer Limits ran twelve days before the Hill's first hypnosis session.
(31:00):
The story is about a devious woman who tries to
steal futuristic technology from a benign, highly advanced alien, only
to have her plan backfire. Can you read my mind? Even?
Do you see it. I cannot read your mind. I
cannot even understand your language. The first thing you have
(31:24):
to understand about the alien in this episode is that
it looks like a person wearing a mask. It's pretty
ridiculous by today's standard, and the alien doesn't really resemble Junior,
but you could describe it as having oversized eyes, negligible nose,
no ears, and a thin mouth. So the descriptions seem similar,
(31:46):
even if they don't look too much alike again, Brian Dunning.
But then recently I heard from one of my listeners,
just in the last year or so that they found
an older episode from the Twilight Zone from April ninety
two called hocus Pocus and Frisbee, and that had an
(32:07):
alien character in it that looked way more like what
we think of as a gray alien and way more
like what Barney Hill described. Man. Last time I saw
anything that looked like you, I've been four days on
the corn jug and the timing for that was interesting.
That came out two years before they did the hypnosis,
(32:29):
so after they say the incident happened. So it's possible
that that Betty could have seen it, or that Barney
could have seen it. Or that they both watched it.
Who knows so right now, that's that's kind of my
favorite explanation of where their description came from and why
it happens to match what we think of as a
typical gray alien today. Again, the alien here is basically
(32:53):
a guy in a mask, but Brian is right that
it is more like what Betty and Barney described. In particular,
the noses just two slots, and the mouth is essentially
not there. Betty and Barney claimed not to have seen
the episode of The Outer Limits, and I haven't found
anything that says whether or not they saw the Twilight
(33:15):
Zone episode. I don't think the Twilight Zone theory was
around while Betty was still alive. Regardless, there are opportunities
to see an ad or an image from a television
show without watching the whole show itself. What does this
all mean, Well, there was a process that began with
the actual UFO citing and continued through Betty's dreams, the
(33:40):
hypnosis sessions, and various attempts to produce likenesses on paper
and through sculpture. The description of the aliens changed over
this period of time, which is not unexpected given what
we know about memory. But most critically, the change in
description from human like creature is two more exotic aliens
(34:02):
happened during hypnosis sessions, and that change reflected popular conceptions
of aliens in television shows at the time. It shows
how the Hill story might have changed in response to
outside cultural factors. It could be that this process was
towards an ever more accurate understanding of what they'd seen,
(34:25):
but the simpler explanation is that the description of these
figures was reflective of their expectation of what they would
see on a UFO rather than a memory. While we
have spent time looking at the story that the Hills
recalled under hypnosis, none of this really reflects on the
original continuously recalled memories of the trip on the night
(34:48):
of September, the night that they saw light in the
sky that eventually became a craft hovering above a field.
Dr Simon believed that the abduction and was from Betty's dreams,
but he felt that something had happened to the Hills
that night. The question is what next time on Strange Arrivals.
(35:12):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written
and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced by Miranda Hawkins
and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey.
Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to
(35:36):
the miln's Special Collections and archives at the University of
New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y A M in Norwich, Connecticut,
John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the
History Channel's dramatic series Project blue Book. Learn more about
the show over at GRIMM and mil dot com. For
(35:56):
more podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio
app Double Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankie. I'm Dudley Dudley. I
live in Durham, Hampshire, and many years ago I lived
in Greenland, New Hampshire, which is just outside of Portsmouth
and Exeter. While I was living there with my husband
(00:25):
and children, we joined a group called Seacoast Council on
Religion and Race. It was in the early sixties and
among the other people who were members of that group
there was a couple Partey in Betty Hill. I got
to know them rather well and invited them to dinner
(00:46):
one night. And after dinner we were sitting in the
living room just talking generalities, and all of a sudden,
out of absolutely nowhere, Barney started to tell the story
of something that had happened to them, oh maybe six
months or eight months earlier. It was the story of
(01:11):
their abduction by aliens. It was jaw dropping. I mean,
it was nothing that I had any reason to believe
apart from there saying it. But I mean there's been
no clues whatsoever. Nobody had whispered about. You know, Barney
and Betty had this adventure. They just started to talk,
(01:35):
and it was compelling. They talked about driving in their
car and coming down the highway and seeing lights flashing.
Somehow the lights urged them to pull over from there.
In their telling of the story, it developed into their
(01:56):
being taken out of the car and into I guess
the spaceship and physically examined. Betty sort of laughed about it,
saying that she figured later that they went back up
into the heavens of wherever from whence they had come,
(02:18):
And we're reporting to their boss of the creatures on
Earth that the male of the species is black, the
female is white, and the offspring is this little sauce
and shaped brown what what we know as a dog.
In their separate hypnosis sessions, Betty and Barney Hill told
(02:42):
remarkably similar stories about being abducted and brought aboard an
alien spacecraft. Last episode, we looked at what we now
know about memory and hypnosis. Simply put, the stories they
told while under hypnosis can't be regarded as an accurate
recall of a real event. But if the abduction didn't happen,
(03:05):
how were their stories so similar? I'm Toby Ball, This
is strange. Arrivals Episode six, Jr. At the time of
(03:28):
their hypnosis sessions in Dr Benjamin Simon believed that the
source material was Betty's dreams can nights after this happened,
I had a series of dreams for five nights. Each
dream is different, which later I found I was a
recall of what it happened, and the dreams were depicting
(03:49):
what you just described to me at that point. What
do you do? Where? When is it? Is it starting?
Is Bonnie trouble by all of this is Bonnie as
his life pattern change? Has his mood changed at all?
Actually the first thing I did, but each during the
next day I wrote down what I could remember my
(04:10):
dream the following day, which would be and every time
I had after So we're talking, and I wrote, I
made a record on the thirty eight years to the day,
and then I took and quote him away. And then
later several months later, I talked to my supervise about
(04:34):
the meaning of dreams and that she said, well, maybe
it happened. That was Betty Hill talking with folklorist John
Horrigan during their hypnosis sessions. Betty told Dr Simon about
the nightmares that she had had over the course of
(04:56):
five nights after the UFO encounter. Dr Simon new Barney
had suffered from anxiety prior to the encounter, but Betty
didn't seem to have a similar prior psychological issue. Working
on the assumption that the abduction had not literally occurred,
he wondered if maybe these dreams had some connection to
(05:18):
distress she was showing under hypnosis as we heard last week.
He also began to wonder if she had been telling
Barney the details of these dreams. Could that be why
his story matched hers. He asked her if she had
talked to anyone about her dreams. This is Dr Simon
(05:38):
on the Larry Glick radio show. In she said, oh, yes,
my supervisor, my sister when we got to work with
some home and have tea together, and I told her
might be And she said that it was my supervisor
who said, Betty, how you know all these how do
(06:01):
you know it isn't true? This is planning the scene. Now,
that had to be true. Not only had she told
someone about her dreams, that person had suggested the possibility
that they were more than dreams, that maybe they were memories.
She also told them that the dreams had been so
(06:22):
remarkable that she had written them down. Dr Simon recognized
this as a great opportunity, so I directed her to
bring in her dreams, that she would find them and
bring them in the next session. She brought them and
they were fully typed up by herself at the time
they occurred. That's where you important one. In November, less
(06:49):
than two months after their encounter with the UFO, Betty
Hill wrote an account of her dreams in a document
titled Dreams or Recall. She began this document by writing
that she was going to describe her dreams in chronological
order of the story, which was not the order she
had dreamt them in. With a few minor discrepancies. She
(07:13):
related the same story that she had told under hypnosis,
the turn off the main highway, the figures in the road,
the experience on the spacecraft, even Barney's dentures, and the
discussion about squash. It is, in all important ways indistinguishable
(07:33):
from the story she told under hypnosis and on a camp.
From inspection of that, with her story, they were exactly
alike with one difference. But in the dreams she went
up told the r hampstanding being embodiable. That's all. They
were exactly alone and still were not accept fully that
(07:57):
they were the same. There was another discrepancy that we
will look at it in a few minutes. But Dr
Simon was struck not only by the nearly identical stories,
but also by the way that her hypnotically recovered story
seemed to reflect a kind of dream logic. By the way,
(08:18):
when I say dreams without not only referring facts she
had read, that she'd written them down, but the whole
structure of the story was out of a dream. There
many contradictures inconsistent with a perfect or righted dream. In fact,
they're part of the nature of dreams. And so this
thing was clearly filled out from me, the concept of
the dream by a lot of inner materials dreams. Her
(08:41):
recall was for Dr Simon the key to the whole
abduction narrative. That gave me an answer at that fact
that the fantastic story was her dreams, and we could
hit that check very well with reality. So I was satisfied.
(09:07):
I didn't have to look any further for us exclamation,
I wouldn't have to accept them. But connections they existed
of space describe whatever they were. There is no question
that her dreams and her hypnosis testimony are the same
story told with very minor variations. This can be explained
(09:31):
in two different ways. The first is the explanation that
Dr Simon preferred Betty had these intense dreams and told
Barney and others about them. When they eventually were hypnotized,
Betty related her dreams, and Barney told what he imagined
his experience would have been based on what he'd heard
(09:52):
about her dreams. Is it plausible that Betty's string of
dreams were caused by the u f O citing on
the night of September I definitely wouldn't say that there's
a reason to believe that something that you've dreamed bears
a straightforward relationship to something that happened in real life.
(10:12):
They're usually related to something that's happening in your real life,
but they're often sort of mixing together different elements. So
it might take a feeling that you've had, maybe you
haven't recognized and kind of dramatized it in a story.
I'm Alice rob and I'm the author of the book
Why We Dream. The dreams that people tend to talk
(10:34):
about and tell their friends about are the more dramatic ones,
and of course those do happen. The reason that we
have those crazy dreams is that when we're dreaming, our
brain is in this different state where the emotion centers
of our brain are very activated, but the rational centers
that usually would keep those emotions in check are more dormant.
(11:01):
So it is consistent with our understanding of how dreams
work that Betty would have nightmares that made a story
out of the anxiety she felt during their UFO encounter
in the White Mountains. The other possibility is that Betty's
dreams were her mind's way of bringing to the surface
events that had happened the night of the encounter, memories
(11:24):
that the alien abductors had somehow caused her and Barney
to forget. If this was the case, the hypnosis sessions
were uncovering actual memories of their abduction. Even if the
hypnotically recalled stories weren't exactly what happened in every detail,
the basic fact that they were brought aboard of spacecraft
(11:45):
was confirmed. That's the argument if you believe the abduction
story is real. I asked Alice rob if there was
any research about whether dreams could conjure up memories that
people had lost. Through him Nisia. The only piece of
research I can think of that involves dreams of people
(12:06):
with amnesia was this study about twenty years ago by
Robert Stickold, who was studying dreams and memory consolidation. This
is one of the first real scientific studies of dreams.
He had people come into his lab and played Tetris
for hours and then had them report their dreams and
(12:26):
found that they would have dreams of Tatris, or dreams
of tiles, or dreams that were sort of influenced by
the game. So he included some regular, healthy undergraduates, and
he also included some patients with amnesia. These were people
with no short term memory. They were unable to remember
things that had happened even just hours before. It was
(12:49):
a small sample. It was only I think six or
seven people, so I wouldn't want to read too too
much into this, but they did have elements of the
game in their dreams, even if they couldn't consciously remember,
like the rules. They would have to relearn how to
play Tetris every time. As Alice said, you can only
(13:12):
put so much stock in a study of this size,
but there is an indication that someone might be able
to recall things in a dream that were lost due
to amnesia. But again, as with any dream, it's not
going to be a replay of actual events. Like hypnosis.
It's a more complicated process. And it's not that surprising
(13:35):
that Betty would think that her dreams were a recall
of an actual event, and that those dreams would eventually
function essentially as memories. There's plenty of history of people
giving great significance to their dreams. I think dreams absolutely
can affect how we remember things. I mean, dreams can
(13:55):
be such powerful and emotional and lifelike experiences in ways
that science can't fully explain. It makes sense to wonder
sort of where they came from, and there are lots
of examples of people undergoing religious conversions or changing their
beliefs after powerful dreams. To me, it seems likely that
(14:16):
Dr Simon's instinct was correct. Betty had dreams that were
a reaction to her experience in the White Mountains, then
under hypnosis, she recalled those dreams as if they had
actually happened. This fits with what we know about dreams.
On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any
(14:38):
scientific evidence that dreams can recall lost memories In the
vivid detail that Betty's described, but there are some discrepancies
in the details of Betty's dreams, Betty's and Barney's hypnosis testimony,
and their later memories. These are most noticeable in the
way the descriptions of the aliens changed over time. After
(15:01):
the break, strange arrivals will return. In a moment. Take
(15:21):
a second and bring up a mental image of an alien.
Most people will probably think of something like this small body,
big head, with an enlarged cranium, as if to accommodate
a huge brain, oversized oval or catlike eyes, diminished nose
(15:41):
and mouth, no ears to speak of. This description is
what people in the UFO community call a gray. Popular
culture has settled on Gray's is what aliens look like.
Think close encounters of the third kind. This conception originates
(16:02):
at least in part with the Hills description of the
aliens they encountered, but they didn't initially describe the beings
they encountered in this way. Their description changed as time
went on. This is from Betty and Barney's ninety six
appearance on the Alan Douglas Show. What was the dream
(16:23):
like that you, gentlemen? Well, actually, so we found out
right that my dreams were very, very similar. There's the
information that we have changed. There were some minor differences,
and I think probably the most important difference is that
(16:45):
in my dream I may see I guess said um,
and I say, more human then they were in dreams
or recall. This is how she describes the alien. During
this time, I became conscious of several things. First, only
(17:06):
one man speaks in English, with a foreign accent, but
very understandable. The others say nothing. I note their physical appearance.
Most of the men are my height, although I cannot
remember the height of the heels on my shoes. None
(17:27):
are as tall as Marnie, so I would judge them
to be five ft to five ft four inches. Their
chests are larger than ours. The noses were larger, longer
than the average size, though I have seen people with
noses like theirs, like Jimmy Durranty's. Their complexions were of
(17:52):
a great tone, like a great paint with black bass.
Their lips were of a bluish tin. Hair and eyes
were very dark, possibly black. And the men were all
dressed alike, presumably in uniform of a light navy blue
color with a gray shade to it. They wore trousers
(18:16):
and short jackets that gave the appearance of zippert sport jackets,
but I am not aware of zippers or buttons for closing.
Shoes were a low slip on style resembling a boot.
I cannot remember any jewelry or insignia. They were all
wearing a military cap similar to Air Force, but not
(18:40):
so broad on top. They were very human in appearance,
not frightening. But this was not how she would describe
them in her hypnosis sessions. Later, in response to a
written question, apparently trying to address this discrepancy, she wrote
the following reply, Her description is in keeping with the
(19:03):
standards of the mid nineties sixties, but it's a little
jarring to hear today. In my dreams, I felt I
made the humanoids more like us than they really were.
Under hypnosis, I described them as mongoloid, a certain type
of retardation, with broad, flat faces, large slanting eyes, small
(19:27):
flattened nose. Their body seemed out of proportion with their
larger chest areas. Barney too initially described the beings as
looking close to human, but as time passed this also changed.
(19:48):
His first glimpse of the aliens came during the encounter
at Indian Head when he sees the occupants of the
craft looking out at him through the bank of windows.
There are the roll of windows, rolls windows, just a
huge row of windows. Barney describes the saucer occupants in
(20:10):
a way that to him conjures menace. Would you see
clearly yes to his face like that, I can think
of his round, I think of you read him Irishman.
As an African American working in Boston in the late
(20:30):
fifties and early sixties, he associated the Irish with racist hostility.
He's surprised that this quote unquote Irishman seems friendly. I
don't know why. I think I know why because Irish
(20:54):
are usually hostile to new grow and when I see
my friend Gus person, I react to it, I thinking
I will be from me. He focuses on another figure two,
one that seems more sinister. I think this one that
(21:19):
is looking over the children, the evil face exactly. Barney
had enlisted in the Army during World War Two. The
Nazi figure is another symbol of threat. I'm going to
(21:39):
see these figures that clearly about distance. I was looking
at him with the Marcos Oh I think it's safe
to say that his descriptions here while under hypnosis are
probably reflective of his emotional reaction, not his visual perception.
(21:59):
I as we have heard, Barney kept his eyes tightly
shut for most of his time on the craft, but
he did open them briefly while he was being examined
on the table. I saw this kind of grayish color,
and this is I think, because most people they're not.
We saw a little green men. And they were not
green men. They were a grayish, metallic kind of gray
(22:24):
in color. And I might also say that I'm quite
sure they were not wearing a mask, rather any kind
of apparatus over the head for breathing purposes, because I
could see what would have been out a thin line
without a lip muffle that when potty when opened, there
was a membrane inside that fluttered really red at the
(22:50):
end of the mouth the towel, and this fluttered. And
this seemed to be a way that they communicated with
one another with a very peculiar kind of bumbling. Uh.
This description maintains the threatening feel of Barney's earlier descriptions
of the Irishman in the Nazi, but this being is
clearly not human, and unlike the beings Betty described in
(23:14):
earlier episodes, Barney's doesn't seem likely to exchange and friendly banter.
Betty and Barney worked with a new Hampshire artist named
David Baker to create drawings of the aliens. Baker wrote
the Hills a letter on October two. It seems that
(23:35):
he had shown them preliminary sketches and they had apparently
been dissatisfied. In the letter, he tries to address their objections,
and I think it gives some insights into their perceptions
of the aliens. He writes eyes slanted opening, rounding sides
of face, indicating peripheral vision. Anatomy for such eyes would
(23:58):
indicate bone structure or to protect such in large eyeballs
as indicated, would extend cheekbones, round curve of ron facial plate,
giving a look to eyes, if not so much oriental
as like a cat's eyes. Someone, maybe Betty, has written
yes in the margin next to this observation. Baker, probably
(24:21):
referring to Barney's description of a membrane in one of
the aliens mouths, theorizes that the aliens might be wearing
some kind of protective film that would distort their features,
much like a bank robber wearing a stocking over his head,
pushing his nose flat, pulling his mouth tight, and blurring
facial details. This theory is met simply with a question mark.
(24:47):
Baker's completed drawings are held at the Milne Special Collections
and Archives at the University of New Hampshire. They portray
what you'd expect, strange figures with large eyes, clad in
the garb that Betty and Barney described, caps, scarves, jackets. Intriguingly,
(25:08):
there's also a haziness to the images is if visually
representing the uncertain process of recall. When you consider that
this is an attempt to portray beings that they considered
to be real, the sketches are pretty eerie, But there's
something else in the archive. The Betty and Barney Hill
(25:29):
papers are spread among some fourteen boxes. Most of the
boxes hold some combination of papers, photographs, and documents. Oversized
Box four, though, holds a very strange artifact, the sculpture
of an alien bust. It's called JR. As best as
(25:51):
they've been able to figure out, it's made of some
kind of resin molded over a window screen core. It's
putty colored with a hint of green. Believe it or not,
this bus was sculpted by Marjorie Fish, the same Marjorie
Fish who constructed the models that pointed to Zeta reticuli
(26:11):
as the origin of the star map. She sculpted the
bust based on David Baker's drawings as well as her own,
which she also made in consultation with Betty. Contrasted to
Baker's drawings, marjorie sketches are very clear and simple, like
something you'd see in a well drawn comic book. To
(26:31):
see Junior in person is jarring. It has a presence.
Here's Betty showing Junior to John Horrigan during the interview.
This is Junior. Now. This is a casado composit of
the individual differences. They do not look alike. There's as
much different between among them is there is any group
(26:55):
of people. But this basically shows a characteristics allowed your eyes, nose, mouth,
no protruding pot No, but this one this is because
he fell off the podium in St. Louis. Okay. So
Buddy's okay though, but he hasn't pronounced brown Ridge. Yeah. Um,
as you said, a pug knows um more or less
(27:18):
a very small orifice for a mouth, and actually, instead
of white's actually have yellow eyes and eyes I see
irishes and pupil. We put the yellow in Okay to
emphasize him. I was gonna say he needs vizine or
or he looks like he has malaria, but okay, okay.
Now Junior has been evaluated by I don't know how
(27:40):
many physical anthropologists, but what he looks like now, if
we continue along the path of evolution, this is what
we're going to look like in years. Junior looks like
an early prototype of a gray It's cranium is enlarged,
but not as much as you'd expect. The eyes are
(28:01):
big and somewhat at an angle, but again not as
exaggerated is what we're used to now. Also, the eyes
have gray irises, black pupils, and as you just heard,
the whites of the eyes are a kind of lemon yellow.
The nose and mouth are barely there. The mouth is
just four lines etched into the face. It makes me
(28:25):
wonder if maybe this was more of a product of
what she quote unquote remembered most about the aliens instead
of what they looked like. The eyes had drawn her
the rest of the face was an afterthought. Betty would
later claim that the grays that we think of now
were not what she saw. Let's just go back to
(28:46):
those type of entities. Um, they were your classic alien,
gray shaped cat like No, no, they weren't. Okay, human
being there were, there are a form of human beings.
Did they have cat like or chestire like eyes? They
had larger eyes than ours, smaller nose, a smaller mouth,
no protruding part of the era. Noa nothing like these
(29:11):
classic grays. You see your Whitley streamers. Da, I'll never
say nos. I don't know what the okay she said.
What she saw was closer in appearance to a tribe
of indigenous people living near Antarctica that she learned about
at a presentation she attended an Exeter, New Hampshire. Junior
in fact, looks to be some kind of midpoint between
(29:33):
a human and the stereotypical gray alien. I understand her
point that what she saw isn't exactly what we think
of now, but her description of the aliens as shown
by Junior is an important step in creating the public
understanding of what an alien looks like. The question that
(29:53):
this begs is if they didn't have an actual encounter.
Where did they get this idea of an aliens appearance?
Well maybe from TV skeptoid host Brian Dunning. So for
a long time the people have been pointing to this
episode of The Outer Limits called the Bollerro Shield as
(30:15):
probably what inspired Barney Hill's description under hypnosis of what
these alien characters look like, because it came out at
the right time that it's it's likely that he would
have seen this on TV or possible anyway, and there
wasn't really anything else in popular culture that might have
informed his idea of what an alien would look like
(30:35):
besides this. I mean, you could just do a Google
search for the Bollerro Shield and you'll see what this
alien looks like, and it's like, yeah, it looks kind
of alien like, but it doesn't really look all that
much like our concept of what we think of as
a gray alien today. The Bolerro Shield episode of The
Outer Limits ran twelve days before the Hill's first hypnosis session.
(31:00):
The story is about a devious woman who tries to
steal futuristic technology from a benign, highly advanced alien, only
to have her plan backfire. Can you read my mind? Even?
Do you see it. I cannot read your mind. I
cannot even understand your language. The first thing you have
(31:24):
to understand about the alien in this episode is that
it looks like a person wearing a mask. It's pretty
ridiculous by today's standard, and the alien doesn't really resemble Junior,
but you could describe it as having oversized eyes, negligible nose,
no ears, and a thin mouth. So the descriptions seem similar,
(31:46):
even if they don't look too much alike again, Brian Dunning.
But then recently I heard from one of my listeners,
just in the last year or so that they found
an older episode from the Twilight Zone from April ninety
two called hocus Pocus and Frisbee, and that had an
(32:07):
alien character in it that looked way more like what
we think of as a gray alien and way more
like what Barney Hill described. Man. Last time I saw
anything that looked like you, I've been four days on
the corn jug and the timing for that was interesting.
That came out two years before they did the hypnosis,
(32:29):
so after they say the incident happened. So it's possible
that that Betty could have seen it, or that Barney
could have seen it. Or that they both watched it.
Who knows so right now, that's that's kind of my
favorite explanation of where their description came from and why
it happens to match what we think of as a
typical gray alien today. Again, the alien here is basically
(32:53):
a guy in a mask, but Brian is right that
it is more like what Betty and Barney described. In particular,
the noses just two slots, and the mouth is essentially
not there. Betty and Barney claimed not to have seen
the episode of The Outer Limits, and I haven't found
anything that says whether or not they saw the Twilight
(33:15):
Zone episode. I don't think the Twilight Zone theory was
around while Betty was still alive. Regardless, there are opportunities
to see an ad or an image from a television
show without watching the whole show itself. What does this
all mean, Well, there was a process that began with
the actual UFO citing and continued through Betty's dreams, the
(33:40):
hypnosis sessions, and various attempts to produce likenesses on paper
and through sculpture. The description of the aliens changed over
this period of time, which is not unexpected given what
we know about memory. But most critically, the change in
description from human like creature is two more exotic aliens
(34:02):
happened during hypnosis sessions, and that change reflected popular conceptions
of aliens in television shows at the time. It shows
how the Hill story might have changed in response to
outside cultural factors. It could be that this process was
towards an ever more accurate understanding of what they'd seen,
(34:25):
but the simpler explanation is that the description of these
figures was reflective of their expectation of what they would
see on a UFO rather than a memory. While we
have spent time looking at the story that the Hills
recalled under hypnosis, none of this really reflects on the
original continuously recalled memories of the trip on the night
(34:48):
of September, the night that they saw light in the
sky that eventually became a craft hovering above a field.
Dr Simon believed that the abduction and was from Betty's dreams,
but he felt that something had happened to the Hills
that night. The question is what next time on Strange Arrivals.
(35:12):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written
and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced by Miranda Hawkins
and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey.
Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to
(35:36):
the miln's Special Collections and archives at the University of
New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y A M in Norwich, Connecticut,
John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the
History Channel's dramatic series Project blue Book. Learn more about
the show over at GRIMM and mil dot com. For
(35:56):
more podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio
app Double Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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