April 7, 2020 • 29 mins
More than two years after their UFO encounter in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill underwent hypnosis therapy with renowned psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon. These sessions revealed that there was more to the Hill's story than they had previously remembered. This story was all the more remarkable because it was so different from the stories of the early years of America's fascination with UFOs - the 1950s.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron mankey Major Keyhole, as author
of the book Flying Saucers Are Real. What is your
opinion of these new sightings of unidentified objects? With a
little due respect to the Air Force, I believe that
(00:22):
some of them will prove to be of interplanetary origin.
During a three year investigation, I found that many police
have described objects of substance and high speed. One case, Polished,
reported their plane was buffeted by an object which pest
them at five miles an hour. Obviously this was a
solid object, and I believe it was from outer space.
(00:43):
On the night of September Ninette Betty and Barney Hill,
a married couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, journeyed home from Montreal.
As they passed through New Hampshire's White Mountains, they had
a UFO sighting that began with a light in the
sky and edded with a close up encounter in a
field near a tourist area known as Indian Head. But
(01:06):
was there more to this story? They arrived home at
least two hours later than they had expected. What had
happened during that time? I'm Toby Ball and This is
Strange Arrivals Episode two Men in the Road. Shortly after
(01:42):
the uf encounter, on the night of September, searching for answers,
Betty Hill went to the Portsmouth Public Library, where she
checked out a book titled The Flying Saucer Conspiracy by
Major Donald E. Keyhoe. That was Major Keyhoe speaking at
a press conference at the beginning of this episode. He
(02:03):
was an Air Force major and the co founder of
the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena or NIECAP, a
prominent UFO investigation organization in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
We'll look at NIECAP later in this episode. The Flying
Saucer Conspiracy was published in nineteen fifty three. The basic
(02:24):
story is that Major Keyho investigates UFO encounters and the
government's knowledge of them. The government, of course, tries to
thwart his investigation as a piece of Cold War paranoia.
It's fascinating. As a work of nonfiction, it doesn't hold
up very well. This excerpt gives you a taste of
(02:45):
what the book is like. The moon could have been
inhabited long ago, been abandoned as conditions changed. It's creatures
could have reached Mars and established a civilization there to
return home only at frequent intervals. For perhaps they used
the Moon as a space base for travel to other planets,
or there may never have been a Moon race at all.
(03:06):
The lunar sphere could have been occupied by outsiders from Mars,
for example, or from a planet beyond our Solar System. Gradually,
a base could have been built up, most of it
underground to avoid meteor falls. The intermittent use of the
Moon is a space base would explain the strange lights
of the past two centuries, as well as the mysterious
radial cracks or lines which might be caused by intense
(03:30):
heat from blast offs. This unknown race might have regarded
with increasing interest our own world. They too, may fear
Our explorations. There was another possible answer. The creatures on
the Moon might be a combination of several races from
other planets. We might never know until we reached the Moon,
(03:51):
unless one of their spaceships landed on Earth. You have
to keep in mind that when this book was written,
near space was a real mystery. Our window on the
planets was the lens of a telescope. We didn't have
any satellites orbiting the Earth. We hadn't put a man
in space, much less on the Moon. Our knowledge of
(04:13):
our Solar system was much more in keeping with what
we knew in eighteen hundred than what we know now.
You could populate the planets with whatever your imagination conceived.
Eight years later, in nineteen sixty one, when Betty and
Barney had their encounter, there were fewer than ten satellites
in orbit. Right now we have more than forty six hundred.
(04:37):
Near space was a far more mysterious place sixty years ago.
The culture surrounding UFOs was also different. Popular interest in
UFOs dates back to June, when a pilot named Kenneth
Arnold saw nine metallic flying discs traveling at high speeds
(04:57):
near Mount Rainier. His story hit the newspapers two days later.
The Chicago Sun, for instance, ran a two page story
headlined Supersonic flying Saucers cited by Idaho pilot speed estimated
at twelve hundred miles an hour when seeing ten thousand
feet up near Mount Rainier. Two weeks later, in New Mexico,
(05:22):
the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Force Base
issued a press release stating that the five hundred and
ninth Operations Group had recovered a flying disc that had
crashed on ranch land. The modern UFO era was underway.
(05:44):
There's only fourteen years between those events, and Betty and
Barney's experience upology was just finding its legs. Two different
types of UFO stories emerged during the nineteen fifties. Part
of what makes the Hills account so compelling is how
drastically it differed from both of them. The first narrative
(06:05):
involves so called contact e s, people who claim to
have met and communicated with aliens. The most famous of
the contacts was an eccentric Polish born American named George
adam Ski. I talked to Aaron Gullias about adam Ski
and the UFO scene of the nineteen fifties. I am
(06:27):
Aaron Gullias. I'm a history professor and writer and host
of the podcast The Saucer Life, where I look at
Flying Saucerer history and lore in all its various forms.
George Adamski was an interesting figure because he started off
not as a flying saucer contact, but as sort of
(06:48):
a spiritualist guru back in the nineteen twenties and thirties
in California, with an organization called the Royal Order of Tibet,
and he developed something he called the Cosmic Philosophy. The
Cosmic philosophy was a not very remarkable mix of Eastern
philosophy and idiosyncratic Christianity. More interestingly, during Prohibition, adam Ski
(07:11):
got permission for the Royal Order of Tibet to make
wine for religious purposes. He made enough, he said, for
all of southern California, and he made quite a bit
of money. But prohibition ended, and with it Adamski's winemaking.
Then he in the nineteen forties, as the Flying Saucer
(07:33):
Craze begins, writes a science fiction novel called Pioneers of Space,
which has a crew of people in a rocket ship
going to various planets in the Solar System and meeting
Martians on Mars, and Venusians on Venus and Moon, and
nights on the Moon, and all of these people in
all these different civilizations have societies that are far in
(07:56):
advanced of what we have here on the Earth. In
the early nineteen fifties, he begins taking photographs of what
he claims are flying saucers. You can find adam Ski's
photos on the Internet. The saucer has been identified as
a model constructed from a German medical lamp and three
light bulbs. In nineteen fifty two, he has a meeting
(08:20):
in the desert with a being from a flying saucer
and he communicates through gestures, and he's from the planet Venus.
The Venusians are concerned because of atomic explosions they've detected
coming from the Earth that this might spell doom for
the balance of the Solar System. These other civilizations have
(08:43):
already passed beyond this stage of development that Earth is in.
Not only did the Venusians come from an advanced and
enlightened civilization, they were, according to Adam Ski, kind of hot.
This is from an interview Adam Ski did it with
radio host long John Nevile. Yeah, a man about a
(09:05):
fight with a seven to eight inches and I would
say around a d and thirty five pounds of quite
delicate hands. Uh, the tapered fingers and beautiful a very
sharp eyes looked like they looked right through you. Sometimes
(09:26):
you couldn't hardly tell what he was really a man
or a woman. And the long hair waving sure resting
on his shoulders. He kind of a half away smile,
and put his hand down and shake and it was
a pump to pump contact anyway, and he smiled. He
started telling me things and I couldn't understand, and I
(09:49):
finally got the idea, I want to know where he's from.
I pointed to the Sun and I made one or
it haland Mercury named it, and then Venish and then
Earth and pointed on myself and they art, and then
I said, we are you from? They got the idea.
He finally pointed to the Sun and he made one
(10:11):
orbit and saying nothing, made a second orbit and he
pointed to himself and to that orbit, and that meant Venish.
That's how I knew he was Venetian. It's hard to
imagine anyone taking this very seriously. Back in the nineteen fifties,
it was very much akin to to science fiction fandom.
(10:33):
And you get the impression that even when they don't
believe every word of something that somebody like Adam Ski wrote,
they recognize the value of his message, which honestly, I
think is what Adam Ski was trying to get across
the flying Saucers. We can take or leave, but his
consistent message of humanity needing, needing, to ascend to a
(10:56):
higher moral plane that predates his saucer stories, goes back
to his stuff he was doing in the twenties and thirties.
So you have the contact e s spreading this story
of peace, fellowship and high spiritual attainment. But there was
another track of interest in UFOs what Aaron calls the
nuts and bolts people, people who took a more scientific
(11:18):
approach trying to determine what was causing these reports of
unidentified craft in the skies. Among its ranks were many
professionals such as journalists, scientists, and military personnel. There's also
from the nuts and bolts people a deep disdain for contact.
He is um for for sort of making UFOs or
(11:41):
flying saucers, something that's easy to laugh at, which brings
us back to Major Keyhoe. Donald Kehoe wasn't the founder
of NIGHTCAP, but he took control of it very quickly.
NIGHTCAP is the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon and
in its earliest incarnation in nineteen fifties, it's governing board
(12:01):
had people who had been connected with the military and
intelligence and and government circles at the national level, and
Donald Kehoe, who was an aviation journalist and Marine Corps
major took a very common sense approach to UFOs. In
a lot of ways, these are strange objects flying in
our skies. They are behaving in ways that our technology can't.
(12:24):
The Air Force has been interested in them. Therefore, the
Air Force must know something about these craft that we
do not know and that they refused to tell us.
So Nightcapp's mission from very early on was in attempting
to get the handling of UFOs. The investigation of UFOs
(12:47):
moved away from the Air Force toward more civilian investigation
efforts to have government hearings and civilian government sponsored research
into the UFO phenomenon, because the Air Force would just
keep everything secret. This secrecy is a main theme of
(13:08):
the Flying Saucer conspiracy. Nightcap saw the Air Force's approach
as being unhelpful to solving the mystery and believed that
if only Congress would authorize a big research project, we
might be able to get to the bottom of this
and get the Air Force out of the picture and
force them to maybe bring forth what they know and
(13:30):
admit whatever the truth might be about it. But Nightcap
was was very much focused on sightings on evidence on
on very detailed, careful reports from witnesses. They had no
time for contact ease, They had no time for anything
they saw as as silly in Nightcap would be the
(13:55):
first group Betty and Barney Hill would reach out to
with their story Strange arrivals will return in a moment.
(14:19):
At the time of the Hills encounter, Nightcap was the
most prominent UFO investigation organization in the country. They had
over five thousand members in chapters across the US. By
the sixties, membership had grown to fourteen thousand. Among its
ranks were many professionals such as journalists, scientists, and military personnel.
(14:46):
After reading Donald Keyhos The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, Betty contacted Nightcap.
They sent an astronomer named Walter Webb to investigate in
October of n a month after the encounter. This early
investigation was mostly concerned with establishing the events that we
looked at in episode one. Here's a passage from Webb's
(15:09):
report on his meeting with the Hills, as read by
an actor. It gives you a sense of his conclusions.
Following my initial six hour interrogation of the witnesses on
October one, nineteen, I was of the opinion the Hills
were telling the truth and that the first encounter with
the UFO occurred exactly as reported, except for minor uncertainties
(15:32):
and technicalities that must be tolerated in any such observation
where human judgment is involved, i e. Exact time and
length of visibility, apparent sizes of object and occupants, distance
and height of object, etcetera. Although their occupations did not
qualify the witnesses as scientific observers, I was impressed by
(15:55):
their intelligence, apparent honesty, and obvious desire to get at
the facts and to play the more sensational aspects of
the siding. Neither witness had read any books on the
UFO subject before the siding. Mr. Hill especially had been
a complete UFO skeptic before the experience. He's still to
test the term flying saucer. Two things changed for Betty
(16:24):
and Barney after the ufone counter. First, Betty had vivid
dreams of being kidnapped and brought aboard a craft. They
were so unusual that she began to think they might
be subconscious memories of an actual abduction. On the night
of the encounter. In November, she wrote about her dreams
(16:45):
in a document titled Dreams or Recall. We'll take a
closer look at these dreams later in the series, but
in introducing the dreams, she writes, I will attempt to
tell my dreams in chronic logical order, although they were
not dreamed in this way, and in fact the first
(17:06):
dream told was the last one dreamed. My emotional feelings
during this part was of terror, greater than I had
ever believed possible. The second thing was that Barney's health
took a turn for the worse. He developed a circular
(17:28):
pattern of warts around his groin, His mental health deteriorated,
and he began to suffer from ulcers. But he explained
this during a talk she gave in Connecticut. Then Barney's
health began to fail and to the point that he
became totally disabled. He would not responding the medication. His
(17:53):
doctor thought that maybe he has some kind of emotional problem,
so he sent Bonnie to a friend of his, a psychiatrist,
and Biling is going in talking about his early childhood
and his mother and his wild We're not al This
psychiatrist was Duncan Stevens, and his office was an Exeter,
New Hampshire. Here's Barney Hill from a man sixty six
(18:19):
appearance on the Alan Douglas Show. I had an altar
that has not bothered him, but he then began to
bother me, and it did not respond to any medication
from the medical cospel, and so h He then decided
about a possibly it had some kind of psychological origin
(18:41):
or cause that continued so that it persisted in we
maybe causing this distress with the UFO encounter was mostly
ignored during these sessions, but in nineteen sixty three, Dr
Stevens felt that Barney could benefit from hypnosis therapy and
(19:04):
referred him to the esteemed Boston based psychiatrist Dr Benjamin Simon.
Dr Simon was famous for his work with returning soldiers
suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Betty went
along with Barney to the first appointment. This is Kathleen Martin,
(19:24):
Betty Hill's niece and an experienced UFO investigator. She indicated
to Dr Simon that she would like to be hypnotized
as well, so he agreed to hypnotize the two of
them separately and to reinstate amnesia because they had amnesia
for the events that occurred with Dr Fireman Umber that individually,
(19:50):
and he also gave us amnesia at the end of reason,
so that we could not remember when had happened, and
that's why we couldn't talk about it. He had worked
with us quite a bit, and then he opened up
the amnesias so we could what had happened. For a time,
(20:11):
Dr Simon ensured that Barney and Betty could not recall
the content of their sessions. This was to prevent further
trauma and to keep them from discussing the memories that
had come up under hypnosis. Eventually, Dr Simon played the
tapes back to the Hills so that they could process
what they had recovered during hypnotic regression. Leader tell me something.
(20:39):
Over the course of these sessions, a story emerged, a
story that explained what had happened during the early hours
of September, a story that seemed to fill in the
missing time from their trip. It starts with Barney, for
no apparent reason, turning off the highway. What they revealed,
(21:03):
and they did this separately, is that somehow they found
themselves on a new road. They were tall trees all around.
Barney turned then onto a dirt road. It's my understanding.
Betty consciously recalled him moving the car, almost stopping them,
(21:24):
but almost screeching the brakes and turning towards the left.
And so they went down this dirt road, and standing
in the dirt road were men and they were holding
One of them was holding some kind of lighted thing
in its hand. There was a red orange glow in
the background. Again from Barney's radio interview. Can you describe
(21:50):
are you? Are you able to describe well? When I
saw them in the headlights of the car before the
lights went out, they were in dart stimular kinds of
dan and I called it a uniform, which I thought
as a p jacket. I also understand Allan that in
(22:11):
critical situation we continually try to put things into the
frame of reference that we can identify with as a
natural thing, so that I thought of the uniforms being
much like a jacket. On March seven, during a hypno
secession in Dr Simon's Boston office, Betty relived what happened
(22:33):
on this remote stretch of road. I thought, well, you know,
they in a car and the cat broke it down,
or what are they doing there? And Donnie said to stop,
and then he stops the calf and these had status
(22:55):
come up to the calf. They they separated. They came
up in two groups. And when they started to do that,
I get real scared. Yeah, the car motor died the
(23:15):
cast off, and whether he started covering up val He
tried to start the car. He tried to start it.
And you know how a mote of a cow just
turn over turn over at WoT five. Yeah, he's trying
to stomach you did what. He's trying to start the car.
(23:39):
It won't start. Because then just and I think, well,
I can't get away from this. I can if I
get the car door up like a brother than wit
and ide and I was thinking of and I just
put my head on the car door and open up it.
Just the may come up and they open it for me.
(24:04):
And they opened the cat door. And this very big
bit and this what next day is this? Who there's
a couple of bits behind me. Is that this body
(24:26):
is okay, this is a bandit each side of him
and my eyes are opened. My body is still asleeps
he's lacking it. He's asleep. And then I think gonna
get bad, And they go, oh the heck are these
(24:51):
characters and what do they think that's going. Yes, So
I turn aroundinized the body. I got, why don't you
wake up? If he doesn't Patty attend? Should he keeps walking?
(25:13):
I keep going a little bit further and I turned
around it I say his name to get body wake up.
He doesn't pay attention that the man who's walking beside
me here, he says, Oh, is his name Unnie? Yes,
(25:36):
that's her round. I looked at this man and I
said it's none of his business. So I didn't speak
to him. Did we keep walking? Did I try to
wake Batty up again? I can see a batty body
wake up, and he doesn't. So the man said he
can't ask me again. He said he's biding his name.
(26:00):
Did I wouldn't ask him? So that he says, He says,
you don't be afraid. You don't have any reason to
be afraid. We wasn't I gonna have you, but we
just want to do some test with a tense of
(26:23):
rowful women. We'll take you a body back and put
you with your car. You'll be a you way back
home in no time. So he was sort of reassuring
it away. But I wasn't get his trusted what he said,
(26:46):
and I wasn't sure what was going to happen, and
we kept the body was told asleep, and then we
came to that's clearing h and I wish it was
(27:06):
lighter so I could get a been a pink ju
hunt up. There was a ramp and it don't want
there was the object was on the grab It was
I say what I was watching as the sky and
there were trees and there was a pass and there
(27:27):
was a claring at this object, just the clary I
could see just about filled up filled up the clearing
and they're taking me up to the object. I had
a lot of a lot of I I don't know
what's going to happen to like a lot of I
(27:48):
don't want to go? Yes, I go up the ramp?
Should I go inside? These weren't Georgia Adamski's beautiful space
piece next But what were they and what did they want? Next?
(28:11):
Time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
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
(28:33):
portrayed by Gina Rickicki. Walter Webb was voiced by Michael J. Weaver.
Special thanks to the MILNS 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 Bluebook.
(28:56):
Learn more about the show over at grimm and mil
dot com. For a more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron mankey Major Keyhole, as author
of the book Flying Saucers Are Real. What is your
opinion of these new sightings of unidentified objects? With a
little due respect to the Air Force, I believe that
(00:22):
some of them will prove to be of interplanetary origin.
During a three year investigation, I found that many police
have described objects of substance and high speed. One case, Polished,
reported their plane was buffeted by an object which pest
them at five miles an hour. Obviously this was a
solid object, and I believe it was from outer space.
(00:43):
On the night of September Ninette Betty and Barney Hill,
a married couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, journeyed home from Montreal.
As they passed through New Hampshire's White Mountains, they had
a UFO sighting that began with a light in the
sky and edded with a close up encounter in a
field near a tourist area known as Indian Head. But
(01:06):
was there more to this story? They arrived home at
least two hours later than they had expected. What had
happened during that time? I'm Toby Ball and This is
Strange Arrivals Episode two Men in the Road. Shortly after
(01:42):
the uf encounter, on the night of September, searching for answers,
Betty Hill went to the Portsmouth Public Library, where she
checked out a book titled The Flying Saucer Conspiracy by
Major Donald E. Keyhoe. That was Major Keyhoe speaking at
a press conference at the beginning of this episode. He
(02:03):
was an Air Force major and the co founder of
the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena or NIECAP, a
prominent UFO investigation organization in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
We'll look at NIECAP later in this episode. The Flying
Saucer Conspiracy was published in nineteen fifty three. The basic
(02:24):
story is that Major Keyho investigates UFO encounters and the
government's knowledge of them. The government, of course, tries to
thwart his investigation as a piece of Cold War paranoia.
It's fascinating. As a work of nonfiction, it doesn't hold
up very well. This excerpt gives you a taste of
(02:45):
what the book is like. The moon could have been
inhabited long ago, been abandoned as conditions changed. It's creatures
could have reached Mars and established a civilization there to
return home only at frequent intervals. For perhaps they used
the Moon as a space base for travel to other planets,
or there may never have been a Moon race at all.
(03:06):
The lunar sphere could have been occupied by outsiders from Mars,
for example, or from a planet beyond our Solar System. Gradually,
a base could have been built up, most of it
underground to avoid meteor falls. The intermittent use of the
Moon is a space base would explain the strange lights
of the past two centuries, as well as the mysterious
radial cracks or lines which might be caused by intense
(03:30):
heat from blast offs. This unknown race might have regarded
with increasing interest our own world. They too, may fear
Our explorations. There was another possible answer. The creatures on
the Moon might be a combination of several races from
other planets. We might never know until we reached the Moon,
(03:51):
unless one of their spaceships landed on Earth. You have
to keep in mind that when this book was written,
near space was a real mystery. Our window on the
planets was the lens of a telescope. We didn't have
any satellites orbiting the Earth. We hadn't put a man
in space, much less on the Moon. Our knowledge of
(04:13):
our Solar system was much more in keeping with what
we knew in eighteen hundred than what we know now.
You could populate the planets with whatever your imagination conceived.
Eight years later, in nineteen sixty one, when Betty and
Barney had their encounter, there were fewer than ten satellites
in orbit. Right now we have more than forty six hundred.
(04:37):
Near space was a far more mysterious place sixty years ago.
The culture surrounding UFOs was also different. Popular interest in
UFOs dates back to June, when a pilot named Kenneth
Arnold saw nine metallic flying discs traveling at high speeds
(04:57):
near Mount Rainier. His story hit the newspapers two days later.
The Chicago Sun, for instance, ran a two page story
headlined Supersonic flying Saucers cited by Idaho pilot speed estimated
at twelve hundred miles an hour when seeing ten thousand
feet up near Mount Rainier. Two weeks later, in New Mexico,
(05:22):
the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Force Base
issued a press release stating that the five hundred and
ninth Operations Group had recovered a flying disc that had
crashed on ranch land. The modern UFO era was underway.
(05:44):
There's only fourteen years between those events, and Betty and
Barney's experience upology was just finding its legs. Two different
types of UFO stories emerged during the nineteen fifties. Part
of what makes the Hills account so compelling is how
drastically it differed from both of them. The first narrative
(06:05):
involves so called contact e s, people who claim to
have met and communicated with aliens. The most famous of
the contacts was an eccentric Polish born American named George
adam Ski. I talked to Aaron Gullias about adam Ski
and the UFO scene of the nineteen fifties. I am
(06:27):
Aaron Gullias. I'm a history professor and writer and host
of the podcast The Saucer Life, where I look at
Flying Saucerer history and lore in all its various forms.
George Adamski was an interesting figure because he started off
not as a flying saucer contact, but as sort of
(06:48):
a spiritualist guru back in the nineteen twenties and thirties
in California, with an organization called the Royal Order of Tibet,
and he developed something he called the Cosmic Philosophy. The
Cosmic philosophy was a not very remarkable mix of Eastern
philosophy and idiosyncratic Christianity. More interestingly, during Prohibition, adam Ski
(07:11):
got permission for the Royal Order of Tibet to make
wine for religious purposes. He made enough, he said, for
all of southern California, and he made quite a bit
of money. But prohibition ended, and with it Adamski's winemaking.
Then he in the nineteen forties, as the Flying Saucer
(07:33):
Craze begins, writes a science fiction novel called Pioneers of Space,
which has a crew of people in a rocket ship
going to various planets in the Solar System and meeting
Martians on Mars, and Venusians on Venus and Moon, and
nights on the Moon, and all of these people in
all these different civilizations have societies that are far in
(07:56):
advanced of what we have here on the Earth. In
the early nineteen fifties, he begins taking photographs of what
he claims are flying saucers. You can find adam Ski's
photos on the Internet. The saucer has been identified as
a model constructed from a German medical lamp and three
light bulbs. In nineteen fifty two, he has a meeting
(08:20):
in the desert with a being from a flying saucer
and he communicates through gestures, and he's from the planet Venus.
The Venusians are concerned because of atomic explosions they've detected
coming from the Earth that this might spell doom for
the balance of the Solar System. These other civilizations have
(08:43):
already passed beyond this stage of development that Earth is in.
Not only did the Venusians come from an advanced and
enlightened civilization, they were, according to Adam Ski, kind of hot.
This is from an interview Adam Ski did it with
radio host long John Nevile. Yeah, a man about a
(09:05):
fight with a seven to eight inches and I would
say around a d and thirty five pounds of quite
delicate hands. Uh, the tapered fingers and beautiful a very
sharp eyes looked like they looked right through you. Sometimes
(09:26):
you couldn't hardly tell what he was really a man
or a woman. And the long hair waving sure resting
on his shoulders. He kind of a half away smile,
and put his hand down and shake and it was
a pump to pump contact anyway, and he smiled. He
started telling me things and I couldn't understand, and I
(09:49):
finally got the idea, I want to know where he's from.
I pointed to the Sun and I made one or
it haland Mercury named it, and then Venish and then
Earth and pointed on myself and they art, and then
I said, we are you from? They got the idea.
He finally pointed to the Sun and he made one
(10:11):
orbit and saying nothing, made a second orbit and he
pointed to himself and to that orbit, and that meant Venish.
That's how I knew he was Venetian. It's hard to
imagine anyone taking this very seriously. Back in the nineteen fifties,
it was very much akin to to science fiction fandom.
(10:33):
And you get the impression that even when they don't
believe every word of something that somebody like Adam Ski wrote,
they recognize the value of his message, which honestly, I
think is what Adam Ski was trying to get across
the flying Saucers. We can take or leave, but his
consistent message of humanity needing, needing, to ascend to a
(10:56):
higher moral plane that predates his saucer stories, goes back
to his stuff he was doing in the twenties and thirties.
So you have the contact e s spreading this story
of peace, fellowship and high spiritual attainment. But there was
another track of interest in UFOs what Aaron calls the
nuts and bolts people, people who took a more scientific
(11:18):
approach trying to determine what was causing these reports of
unidentified craft in the skies. Among its ranks were many
professionals such as journalists, scientists, and military personnel. There's also
from the nuts and bolts people a deep disdain for contact.
He is um for for sort of making UFOs or
(11:41):
flying saucers, something that's easy to laugh at, which brings
us back to Major Keyhoe. Donald Kehoe wasn't the founder
of NIGHTCAP, but he took control of it very quickly.
NIGHTCAP is the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon and
in its earliest incarnation in nineteen fifties, it's governing board
(12:01):
had people who had been connected with the military and
intelligence and and government circles at the national level, and
Donald Kehoe, who was an aviation journalist and Marine Corps
major took a very common sense approach to UFOs. In
a lot of ways, these are strange objects flying in
our skies. They are behaving in ways that our technology can't.
(12:24):
The Air Force has been interested in them. Therefore, the
Air Force must know something about these craft that we
do not know and that they refused to tell us.
So Nightcapp's mission from very early on was in attempting
to get the handling of UFOs. The investigation of UFOs
(12:47):
moved away from the Air Force toward more civilian investigation
efforts to have government hearings and civilian government sponsored research
into the UFO phenomenon, because the Air Force would just
keep everything secret. This secrecy is a main theme of
(13:08):
the Flying Saucer conspiracy. Nightcap saw the Air Force's approach
as being unhelpful to solving the mystery and believed that
if only Congress would authorize a big research project, we
might be able to get to the bottom of this
and get the Air Force out of the picture and
force them to maybe bring forth what they know and
(13:30):
admit whatever the truth might be about it. But Nightcap
was was very much focused on sightings on evidence on
on very detailed, careful reports from witnesses. They had no
time for contact ease, They had no time for anything
they saw as as silly in Nightcap would be the
(13:55):
first group Betty and Barney Hill would reach out to
with their story Strange arrivals will return in a moment.
(14:19):
At the time of the Hills encounter, Nightcap was the
most prominent UFO investigation organization in the country. They had
over five thousand members in chapters across the US. By
the sixties, membership had grown to fourteen thousand. Among its
ranks were many professionals such as journalists, scientists, and military personnel.
(14:46):
After reading Donald Keyhos The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, Betty contacted Nightcap.
They sent an astronomer named Walter Webb to investigate in
October of n a month after the encounter. This early
investigation was mostly concerned with establishing the events that we
looked at in episode one. Here's a passage from Webb's
(15:09):
report on his meeting with the Hills, as read by
an actor. It gives you a sense of his conclusions.
Following my initial six hour interrogation of the witnesses on
October one, nineteen, I was of the opinion the Hills
were telling the truth and that the first encounter with
the UFO occurred exactly as reported, except for minor uncertainties
(15:32):
and technicalities that must be tolerated in any such observation
where human judgment is involved, i e. Exact time and
length of visibility, apparent sizes of object and occupants, distance
and height of object, etcetera. Although their occupations did not
qualify the witnesses as scientific observers, I was impressed by
(15:55):
their intelligence, apparent honesty, and obvious desire to get at
the facts and to play the more sensational aspects of
the siding. Neither witness had read any books on the
UFO subject before the siding. Mr. Hill especially had been
a complete UFO skeptic before the experience. He's still to
test the term flying saucer. Two things changed for Betty
(16:24):
and Barney after the ufone counter. First, Betty had vivid
dreams of being kidnapped and brought aboard a craft. They
were so unusual that she began to think they might
be subconscious memories of an actual abduction. On the night
of the encounter. In November, she wrote about her dreams
(16:45):
in a document titled Dreams or Recall. We'll take a
closer look at these dreams later in the series, but
in introducing the dreams, she writes, I will attempt to
tell my dreams in chronic logical order, although they were
not dreamed in this way, and in fact the first
(17:06):
dream told was the last one dreamed. My emotional feelings
during this part was of terror, greater than I had
ever believed possible. The second thing was that Barney's health
took a turn for the worse. He developed a circular
(17:28):
pattern of warts around his groin, His mental health deteriorated,
and he began to suffer from ulcers. But he explained
this during a talk she gave in Connecticut. Then Barney's
health began to fail and to the point that he
became totally disabled. He would not responding the medication. His
(17:53):
doctor thought that maybe he has some kind of emotional problem,
so he sent Bonnie to a friend of his, a psychiatrist,
and Biling is going in talking about his early childhood
and his mother and his wild We're not al This
psychiatrist was Duncan Stevens, and his office was an Exeter,
New Hampshire. Here's Barney Hill from a man sixty six
(18:19):
appearance on the Alan Douglas Show. I had an altar
that has not bothered him, but he then began to
bother me, and it did not respond to any medication
from the medical cospel, and so h He then decided
about a possibly it had some kind of psychological origin
(18:41):
or cause that continued so that it persisted in we
maybe causing this distress with the UFO encounter was mostly
ignored during these sessions, but in nineteen sixty three, Dr
Stevens felt that Barney could benefit from hypnosis therapy and
(19:04):
referred him to the esteemed Boston based psychiatrist Dr Benjamin Simon.
Dr Simon was famous for his work with returning soldiers
suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Betty went
along with Barney to the first appointment. This is Kathleen Martin,
(19:24):
Betty Hill's niece and an experienced UFO investigator. She indicated
to Dr Simon that she would like to be hypnotized
as well, so he agreed to hypnotize the two of
them separately and to reinstate amnesia because they had amnesia
for the events that occurred with Dr Fireman Umber that individually,
(19:50):
and he also gave us amnesia at the end of reason,
so that we could not remember when had happened, and
that's why we couldn't talk about it. He had worked
with us quite a bit, and then he opened up
the amnesias so we could what had happened. For a time,
(20:11):
Dr Simon ensured that Barney and Betty could not recall
the content of their sessions. This was to prevent further
trauma and to keep them from discussing the memories that
had come up under hypnosis. Eventually, Dr Simon played the
tapes back to the Hills so that they could process
what they had recovered during hypnotic regression. Leader tell me something.
(20:39):
Over the course of these sessions, a story emerged, a
story that explained what had happened during the early hours
of September, a story that seemed to fill in the
missing time from their trip. It starts with Barney, for
no apparent reason, turning off the highway. What they revealed,
(21:03):
and they did this separately, is that somehow they found
themselves on a new road. They were tall trees all around.
Barney turned then onto a dirt road. It's my understanding.
Betty consciously recalled him moving the car, almost stopping them,
(21:24):
but almost screeching the brakes and turning towards the left.
And so they went down this dirt road, and standing
in the dirt road were men and they were holding
One of them was holding some kind of lighted thing
in its hand. There was a red orange glow in
the background. Again from Barney's radio interview. Can you describe
(21:50):
are you? Are you able to describe well? When I
saw them in the headlights of the car before the
lights went out, they were in dart stimular kinds of
dan and I called it a uniform, which I thought
as a p jacket. I also understand Allan that in
(22:11):
critical situation we continually try to put things into the
frame of reference that we can identify with as a
natural thing, so that I thought of the uniforms being
much like a jacket. On March seven, during a hypno
secession in Dr Simon's Boston office, Betty relived what happened
(22:33):
on this remote stretch of road. I thought, well, you know,
they in a car and the cat broke it down,
or what are they doing there? And Donnie said to stop,
and then he stops the calf and these had status
(22:55):
come up to the calf. They they separated. They came
up in two groups. And when they started to do that,
I get real scared. Yeah, the car motor died the
(23:15):
cast off, and whether he started covering up val He
tried to start the car. He tried to start it.
And you know how a mote of a cow just
turn over turn over at WoT five. Yeah, he's trying
to stomach you did what. He's trying to start the car.
(23:39):
It won't start. Because then just and I think, well,
I can't get away from this. I can if I
get the car door up like a brother than wit
and ide and I was thinking of and I just
put my head on the car door and open up it.
Just the may come up and they open it for me.
(24:04):
And they opened the cat door. And this very big
bit and this what next day is this? Who there's
a couple of bits behind me. Is that this body
(24:26):
is okay, this is a bandit each side of him
and my eyes are opened. My body is still asleeps
he's lacking it. He's asleep. And then I think gonna
get bad, And they go, oh the heck are these
(24:51):
characters and what do they think that's going. Yes, So
I turn aroundinized the body. I got, why don't you
wake up? If he doesn't Patty attend? Should he keeps walking?
(25:13):
I keep going a little bit further and I turned
around it I say his name to get body wake up.
He doesn't pay attention that the man who's walking beside
me here, he says, Oh, is his name Unnie? Yes,
(25:36):
that's her round. I looked at this man and I
said it's none of his business. So I didn't speak
to him. Did we keep walking? Did I try to
wake Batty up again? I can see a batty body
wake up, and he doesn't. So the man said he
can't ask me again. He said he's biding his name.
(26:00):
Did I wouldn't ask him? So that he says, He says,
you don't be afraid. You don't have any reason to
be afraid. We wasn't I gonna have you, but we
just want to do some test with a tense of
(26:23):
rowful women. We'll take you a body back and put
you with your car. You'll be a you way back
home in no time. So he was sort of reassuring
it away. But I wasn't get his trusted what he said,
(26:46):
and I wasn't sure what was going to happen, and
we kept the body was told asleep, and then we
came to that's clearing h and I wish it was
(27:06):
lighter so I could get a been a pink ju
hunt up. There was a ramp and it don't want
there was the object was on the grab It was
I say what I was watching as the sky and
there were trees and there was a pass and there
(27:27):
was a claring at this object, just the clary I
could see just about filled up filled up the clearing
and they're taking me up to the object. I had
a lot of a lot of I I don't know
what's going to happen to like a lot of I
(27:48):
don't want to go? Yes, I go up the ramp?
Should I go inside? These weren't Georgia Adamski's beautiful space
piece next But what were they and what did they want? Next?
(28:11):
Time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
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
(28:33):
portrayed by Gina Rickicki. Walter Webb was voiced by Michael J. Weaver.
Special thanks to the MILNS 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 Bluebook.
(28:56):
Learn more about the show over at grimm and mil
dot com. For a more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
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