May 12, 2020 • 30 mins
The Hills described their UFO encounter taking place over several miles, beginning with a bright light in the sky and ending with a craft hovering above a field. Nobody believes they were just making their story up. So what did they see that night as they drove through northern New Hampshire?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
When the Pilgrim Fathers came to America in search of
religious and political freedom, they settled in the northeastern sector
of our country known as New England, a part of
New England after the English county of Hampshire came to
be known as New Hampshire. New Hampshire is a land
(00:32):
of history, a contentment, and charm. For those of you
who are looking for a thrill, here you have it.
In the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway. It's a fascinating, breath
taking ride, and as your car nears the summit, there
is an unforgettable view of the White Mountain National Part.
(01:01):
One of nature's most awe inspiring worked is this giant
profile of the Old Man of the Mountains, sculptured out
of the granite cliffs at Franconia Knock. In the previous
two episodes, we've looked at how what we know about
memory and regression. Hypnosis raised serious doubts about Betty and
(01:23):
Barney Hill's story of alien abduction, but these doubts don't
apply to the parts of the September trip that Betty
and Barney remembered before hypnosis. Dr Benjamin Simon, who conducted
the hypnosis sessions with the Hills said that while he
believed the memories from hypnosis were from Betty's dreams, something
(01:45):
had actually happened that night. The question is what I'm
Toby Ball and this is strange. Arrivals Episode seven, motion parallax.
(02:13):
The Hills planned to spend the night of September in Montreal.
They'd driven about two hours that morning from a motel
west of Montreal and became lost in the city before
deciding to drive eight hours through the night to their
home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. UFO researcher Robert Shaefer one
(02:34):
thing that people don't often note is that they had
been driving for a very long time. I think they
had been on the road, like twelve hours or more,
and if you talk about distracted drivers, that concern certainly
applies here. Betty at first saw a light that seemed
to be following them, and she was convinced that it
(02:58):
was a UFO. Her excitedness gradually got Barney to be
excited as well. The first stop they made to get
a better look at this light was just north of
Franconian Notch State Park. From episode one, Kathleen Martin, as
she watched this, and it grew larger and larger. She
(03:20):
became very curious, so south of Twin Mountain, she asked
Barney to stop by the side of the road. This
was at the Mount Cleveland picnic area, and they got
out of the car with binoculars and looked up at
this thing in the sky. There's this period of time
when they are south of Lancaster, New Hampshire, until they
(03:42):
get close to Cannon Mountain, when the light is a
long way off but seems to be getting closer and
is moving around in the sky. There are two possible
explanations for this that I want to talk about. The
most common among skeptics is that at this point in
the journey, Eddie is seeing the planet Jupiter. But why
(04:03):
would she think it was moving and getting closer. Robert Schaeffer,
followed by skeptoid host Brian dunning Well, the road curves
and the mountains are there hiding and revealing the Moon
and Jupiter and anything else that they might be looking at.
Is very common in the in the history of the
(04:23):
UFO sightings and even at the present time. But people
say this object was following us. It was moving from
one side of the road to the other. But again,
you know, many roads, especially in mountainous areas, do not
go on a straight line. They curved back and forth.
It's very easy to get confused about, you know, what
direction you're looking at something that isn't really in question.
(04:43):
That's a very common thing, amount you know, UFO sightings.
I am persuaded that that is a very good explanation
for the white light that they saw in the sky.
I have had similar experiences myself. I've done a lot
of sailing, and when you see a light in the
distance and your on a boat and the boat's moving,
the illusion that it's the light that's moving and not
(05:04):
you can be extremely persuasive. I do think that that
is a sufficient explanation for the white light that they reported.
I've heard that people do get confused by planets at night,
but I still have a hard time believing that this
misidentification of Jupiter is the beginning of the Hill encounter.
(05:25):
Even fatigued driving dark, lonely roads at night, I just
can't picture it. I attended a meeting of the Granite
State Skeptics, a group in New Hampshire that gets together
once a month to discuss paranormal phenomena. I brought up
that I didn't quite buy the Jupiter explanation. One of
(05:47):
the people there, a retired Air Force officer named Steve Lundquist,
had a story. So this is really about being an
expert witness and people knowing or should know better, and
they can still make mistakes. So just talking about myself personally,
air Force pilot over three thousand hours and jets flying
(06:09):
all over the world, amateur astronomer, and you know, in
the Air Force you even get courses on you know,
aviation weather and all those sort of things. So with
that sort of a background, you know, you'd think I'd
know better. But one time we were in the Middle
East and we were flying along mission and it was
(06:30):
you know, the typical old dark thirty and we're flying
towards Saudi Arabia and we see an aircraft in front
of us, and you know, it's hard to tell exactly
what kind of aircraft it is. You know, if it's
by its brightness and it's really far away, it's probably
a big one. But if it's closer, it's probably a
small one. And we didn't think much of it until
(06:52):
we noticed that it was climbing and after a while
it climbed pretty high, and since we couldn't paint it
on ray are, we figured it was far away, so
it must have been a large aircraft and far away.
We're looking at the altitude that it's getting to and
we're figuring to ourselves, no US aircraft can reach these altitudes.
It just can't. Trigonometry actually came into the whole equation,
(07:15):
you know. We put its existent to see what the
angle was, and we're like, wow, this thing is like
up there like a hundred and twenty thousand feet. Nothing
can do that. And of course as we're flying along,
we're like, going, jee's a wax is awfully quiet tonight too? Yeah, one,
what's up? Why is that? What's going on? Now? If
(07:36):
I've gone back and reported to people we saw this airplane,
it was doing things no aircraft we know of can do,
you know, And then we said it was a UFO.
You'd probably believe me because you know, I'm an Air
Force pilot, I fly, I no astronomy, I'm an engineer,
I have top secret clearance all that stuff. You believe me, right.
(07:56):
We thought about it a little bit more and we
came to realize it actually was Venus. But because we've
been looking for traffic. You know, when you're flying, you're
always looking for what you might run into. Open the sky,
we fixated on it's an aircraft. This bright light in
the sky is another airplane. We don't want to hit it.
(08:19):
And even though it was starting to do things no
other aircraft can do, in our minds, still stayed as
an aircraft as opposed to Venus. Classic mistake of Venus
as an aircraft. And it's like I should have known better,
and I still made that mistake. There's another explanation that
(08:41):
I find still more convincing, brought to us by Jim McDonald.
I write science fiction novels. I'm a magician, I'm an E. M. T.
And I live here in the north country of Namshure.
Jim's explanation relies on some of the same principles as
the Jupiter explanation, but comes to a different conclusion about
(09:02):
the source of the light. One day on the September,
to make it exactly the right date, my wife and
my daughter and I all drove down Route three, following
Betty and Barney's route, with a copy of Interrupted Journey,
which my wife was reading aloud while I took time
kicks and mileage measurements and discovered some interesting things. Remember,
(09:27):
The Interrupted Journey is the book written by John Fuller
that first told the story of the Hill's journey and
their sessions with Dr Benjamin Simon. Just south of Lancaster,
when you cross up on the shoulder of Mount Prospect
Corrigan Hill, that's the first spot that Betty and Barney
saw their UFO. They're flying saucer. And when you cross
(09:50):
the crest of Mount Prospect, same exact spot, that's the
first place that you can see the warning light on
the top of Camon Mountain. Immediately after seeing the UFO,
it began to move rapidly straight up. It was like
a shooting star, only it fell up, I think is
the quote. Immediately after you cross the shoulder of Mountain Prospect,
(10:12):
US three goes down a nine grade for the next
half mile, pointed directly at Cannon Mountain, and that aircraft
warning light apparently moves straight up. Well, that flying saucer,
Betting and Barney's disappeared on one side of the road,
reappeared on the other. It was sometimes high, sometimes low,
just like that aircraft warning light. They're flying saucer got larger,
(10:36):
brighter and closer the farther south they went, and so
does the aircraft warning line gets larger, brighter and closer.
I said to myself, my golly, I think I'm seeing
their UFO right now. Actually I had already said that
because I've made the connection. I've made the connection years before,
but now I was testing out for sure. And we
get to the sighting that really clinches everything. Bet and
(11:00):
Barney are the foot of Cannon Mountain. They're looking up
the top of Cannon Mountain and they're seeing the lights
at the tramway station. There is a aerial tramway, the
first one in America started, goes up the side of
the mountain. At the upper tramway house, there is a
snack bar and there's lights you can see from the road.
Betty and Barney reported seeing those lights of the snack bar,
(11:23):
and they reported seeing the their UFO. They're flying saucer
at the same time. As you stand at the foot
of Cannon Mountain on the side of the Root three,
looking up at the top of the mountain, you see
the lights at the top of the tramway and you
see the aircraft warning light so Betty and Barney they're
looking at the aircraft warning light, their point at the
aircraft warning light, and they're saying, that's it. That's the
(11:45):
flying saucer. I mean case closed right there. Strange arrivals
will return in a moment. This illusion of the lights
(12:09):
on top of Cannon Mountain moving when in fact it
is the car that is moving, is made further convincing
by an effect called motion parallax Mark Ken from the
University of New Hampshire. Other things that night include seeing
the light which other people have said that is simply
(12:29):
a the beacon from a ski resort, and the fact
that it seemed to follow them is absolutely perfectly in
line with a depth cue called motion parallax, where you
see things closer they are, the faster they moved, the
further away they are, the slower they move. This was
at a distance away, so it appeared to kind of
follow their car, but it was at not the distance
(12:51):
away that the stars were, so it was moving differently
from the stars, so it could look really weird if
you don't know what you're looking at. Route three runs
about two and eighty miles from the Canadian border in
New Hampshire, south to Boston. The main events of the
hill siding took place over a distance of about a
(13:13):
dozen miles from the Mount Cleveland Scenic Area to somewhere
around the Indian Head Resort. This stretch takes you from
just north of Franconia Notch through the notch itself, with
mountains on either side, including Cannon Mountain and The Old
Man in the Mountain on the right, and Mount Lafayette
(13:33):
on the left. After about seven miles in the notch,
Route three exits into the lower hills, including the area
around Indian Head. On a November afternoon, I drove this
route that Betty and Barney took. It struck me that
so much has changed since. Once you enter Franconia Notch,
(13:57):
it's hard to feel like you are really recreate aiding
their journey with any sort of precision. The path Route
three takes follows the same course north of the notch
at the Mount Cleveland picnic area and south of the
Notch around Indian Head, but the section that goes through
the notch itself has been merged with the newer Root
(14:19):
ninety three and takes a slightly different course. The Old
Man in the Mountain has also changed. It was a
naturally formed rock outcropping that, when viewed at the right angle,
as it was by thousands and thousands of tourists every year,
looked like the craggy profile of an old man. It's
(14:40):
gone now collapsing on May third, two thousand and three,
but it was there in and the Hills reportedly used
that profile to estimate the size of the UFO. So
they entered Franconian Notch, driving south, with Cannon Mountain on
their right. Most skeptics agree that at this point, even
(15:03):
if she had previously been seeing Jupiter, Betty is looking
at the lights on the summit of Cannon Mountain. Barney
is driving. Once they are in the notch, they stop
at some point near the Old Man in the mountain.
They get out of the car to look at the UFO.
It is now close enough to be recognizable as a
(15:25):
craft of some sort, not just a light. They stopped
again at the base of the Old Man of the mountain.
They got out and they looked up at this thing
again through binoculars. As they're watching it, it appeared to
be lighted on only one side, and it appeared to
be rotating. It's here that the story becomes more incredible.
(15:49):
A planet or a summit light are no longer adequate explanations.
My name is Travis Roy. I run Grand State Skeptics.
I spent about a year researching the Betting and Barney
Hill abduction and going to the archives at U n
H to look through all the original documentation, and in
(16:12):
my day job, i am a I T guy. Travis
realized that the moment at which the Hills UFO became
more than a light is the same time that they
were near the Cannon Mountain Tramway. The Old Man in
the Mountain Historic site is right where Cannon Mountain Aerial
(16:32):
Tramway is. Then you have Cannon Mountain to the southwest
of that, and then it's about six and a half
miles to get to Indian Head Resort. So if you're
talking three miles up from Indian Head, you can see
the top of Cannon Mountain. It's not until you get
within like a mile or two of Indian Head that
(16:53):
you can't see it. So if they saw something at
the Old Man of the Mountain site, and then on
the way towards Indian Head, they pulled over and looked
through binoculars and saw something. It seems totally plausible to
me that they would have saw the Cannon Mountain Tramway
and then they the next thing they saw driving down
(17:14):
the road would have been Indian Head Resort, which makes sense.
That's how I would explain it too, if it happened
to me and the Hills description of the UFO seems
similar to the appearance of the tram car that was
used in the early nineteen sixties. If you look at
the picture of the craft, it looks kind of like
(17:35):
the old tramway, not the current one, but the one
that existed at the time. It's much more boxy than
your typical UFO that you think of as a flying saucer,
and it had things protruding from the sides. But I
mean that could be the way the lights are, or
it could have been reflections on something. It could have
(17:56):
been anything, but the actual craft piece of it, where
it has the body of the craft and the windows
and the figures inside, looks very similar to what the
Cannon Tramway looked like at the time. The Cannon Mountain
Tramway was built in It was the first aerial passenger
(18:17):
tramway in North America. The base station for the tramway
is just a few hundred yards from the Old Man
in the Mountain parking lot. There's now a gift store
where the viewing area once was. One skeptical theory is
that Betty and Barney expected to see a UFO, saw
(18:38):
the tram car and were confused. On the face of it,
it's not such a far fetched idea. One of the
hard things about trying to recreate what happened during that
brief time is that it is not clear where they
stopped after the Mount Cleveland Scenic Area. They could have
pulled over at any point around the Old Man in
(18:59):
the mountain. If they were north of the tramway, It's
entirely possible that the tram car passed in front of
their view of the Old Man. There aren't many visual
cues there to determine distance. In the darkness, especially when
looking through binoculars, the tram car would have seemed bigger
compared to the Old Man because it would have been
(19:21):
much closer to where Betty and Barney had stopped. The
problem is that there's no evidence that the tram was
running at that late hour. It was well after the
last scheduled tourist run. The restaurant at the top of
Cannon Mountain was closing around that time, so maybe it
(19:43):
was being used to bring down staff or something like that,
but there's no record of it from the old man
in the mountain. They continued south for a few miles,
briefly stopping at times, and eventually encountering the craft in
the field near Indian Head. This is where Barney saw
the figures in the craft looking back at him. He
(20:07):
took his binoculars, helped him up to his eyes and
looked up at this object. He could see a lighted
row of windows that seemed to be around the front
part of this craft. Gazing back at him were between
eight and eleven figures inside the craft. The skeptical explanation
(20:28):
begins with Betty and Barney's fatigue and stress. They've been
on the road for hours. Betty in particular, thinks they
are being followed by a UFO. Her nervousness is affecting
Barney because they are not thinking clearly, they misconstrue whatever
they see near Indian Head. With this in mind, Travis
(20:52):
Roy speculates about what they might have seen. I've done
that drive and you can't see Cannon Mountain from the
Indian Head Resort. You can see it from a small
drive north. The distance isn't that much, And that goes
back to what I said about how it's really hard
(21:12):
to tell exactly where you are. The other thing, too,
is is that and they're retelling of it. They pulled
over at one point at Indian Head and Barney went
across the street and looked at the craft through binoculars. Now,
if they were doing that, I mean Indian Head Resort
was there during that time, there would have been other
people around there. I mean, even in the middle of
(21:34):
the night, there's still like the hotel staff and stuff,
and there would have been lights on and everything else.
So I really don't think that that's where they stopped
to look at the craft, because if they saw that,
wouldn't you have gone into the hotel for help or like,
I'm seeing this crazy thing. I think that it happened
(21:55):
north of Indian Head before they got there, and they
just say at it's Indian Head because that was the
next landmark that they hit. There is a problem with
this explanation. Betty actually describes passing the Indian Head Resort
before they have the encounter in the field because they
(22:16):
are traveling from north to south. If you are sure
that Betty is right about the sequence of events, this
doesn't fit Travis's timeline. Jim McDonald has an alternate explanation
for this part of the story, which is consistent with
Betty's sequence of events. He believes that the encounter in
(22:37):
the field happened in Woodstock, about eight miles south of
the Indian Head Resort. They continue on south and here
comes the really horrible part of this. They get down
to Woodstock where you find the jack O lanterns, which
back in the early sixties had a large inflatable, glowing
(22:59):
red or orange spherical jack lantern up on the roof
of the motel, and this got inflated in their minds
with the glowing red orange moon with the white aircraft
warning light on the top of Cannon Mountain, and it
is my belief that this is the point where they
leaped out of their cars were running around the field,
and that later under hypnotic regression, became the abduction site.
(23:24):
Later on, months later, when they were trying to find
the place where they were abducted, they didn't find it,
and they decided it must have been near Indian Heads somewhere,
because it had to have been south of Franconian Notch.
But it's notoriously difficult to find again during daylight someplace
that you've only seen at night and memory is weird.
(23:45):
Could this be the place? Yes, this was the place.
It is the place, and it became fixed. Robert Shaffer
doesn't even point to any particular physical object for him,
their exhaustion and excitement are explanation enough. Once they finally
reached the state where they were both very excited and
(24:06):
frightened when they got to this area called the Indian Head,
which is like a profile on them, a mountain like
the Old Man of the Mountain used to be. I'm
not sure what they were seeing at certain times there,
but yeah, they neither one of them was any longer
in a rational state of mind at that point. Fatigue
and fear do a lot of heavy lifting in these explanations.
(24:29):
Without these two factors, they aren't very convincing. If you
are predisposed to think that the Hills were abducted, you
probably don't buy them. But it's important to keep in
mind that even if you don't accept any of these explanations.
The default is not an alien spaceship. In fact, the
(24:50):
burden of proof is with the proponents of the Hills story.
Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What we
have is a great story, but little in the way
of convincing proof that had happened. This applies to the
physical evidence that Betty and Barney had at the end
(25:11):
of their trip. Remember how Kathleen Martin described Betty's torn
dress and Barney's scuff shoes. According to the abduction story,
these happened when the Hills were being brought through the
woods to the spacecraft. Is there another explanation? So what
else do we have. We've got Betty's dress, which was torn.
(25:34):
I have no idea how she tore her dress. There's
lots of ways to tear a dress, particularly leaping in
and out of a car in Fields and New Hampshire
in the middle of the night. The dress developed a
white powder on it some years later, which exactly resembles mold,
and barney shoes were scuffed, easy enough to do with
(25:55):
a stick shift car, gas pedal, brake, pedal and clutch,
and while leaping in and out of a car in
open Fields, New Hampshire, in the middle of the night.
Jim McDonald did not mention the broken binocular strap, but
presumably the same explanation would apply. The strap gets snagged
(26:15):
on the door, perhaps as Barney jumps out of the car,
which leaves the most compelling and most frustrating piece of
physical evidence, the shiny spots on the trunk of their car.
Remember Betty took a compass out to the car and
when she placed it on the round shiny spots, the
(26:35):
needle spun. There does not appear to have been any
further investigation. This is Betty and Barney on the David
Schumberg Show. We discussed the spots with Ball to Live
and with Mr Harman and Mr Jackson, But we have
spent ours discussing this, and then it was just over
(26:59):
on the at leaving when I left us. We just
took out to show them to exam into Mr Webb,
maybe John who was Yes, I did, and Walder Webb
simply throws up his hand and discussed his own failure
as an investigator. I am convinced in my own own
line and nothing was hidden and it was simply a
(27:20):
very serious oversight. And he agrees that it was Ed
Dalson of World Journal Tribune O those spots still there,
and if not were what happened to them? The spots
gradually wore away over the winter months, and we don't
have the can they have. Dr Benjamin Simon, who conducted
(27:41):
the hypnosis sessions with the Hell's was confounded by this
failure to examine the spots. Can't be one of the
greatest mistakes I have ever seen. That is that the
vir was assignedists and there was the story of the
silver spots outside of Silvergonald in the back of their car,
(28:04):
which they said at the time, Uh, we're still on
the car, and God don't what reasons he never went
out to look at It was an opportoint you to
see one single objective thing, you know, we've never had
a single objective thing. In the end, what might have
been the most intriguing piece of evidence to emerge from
(28:26):
this whole encounter was left unexamined. It seems incredible that
this trunk, which could have been the critical proof of
an alien encounter, was ignored and left to the elements.
But that's what happened. So what we are left with
our questions about time to begin with both Betty's and
(28:50):
Barney's watches stopped working that night and never worked again.
More importantly, none of what we've heard accounts for their
arriving home two hours later than they had expected. What
about the missing time next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange
(29:14):
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 Rickike. Barney
Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to the
(29:37):
Miln Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire,
John Horrigan, w y Am in Norwich, Connecticut, John White,
and David O'Leary, the executive producer of The History Channel's
dramatic series Project Bluebook. Learn more about the show over
at Grimm and Mile dot com. For more podcasts from
(29:58):
I Heart Radio Physic, the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
When the Pilgrim Fathers came to America in search of
religious and political freedom, they settled in the northeastern sector
of our country known as New England, a part of
New England after the English county of Hampshire came to
be known as New Hampshire. New Hampshire is a land
(00:32):
of history, a contentment, and charm. For those of you
who are looking for a thrill, here you have it.
In the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway. It's a fascinating, breath
taking ride, and as your car nears the summit, there
is an unforgettable view of the White Mountain National Part.
(01:01):
One of nature's most awe inspiring worked is this giant
profile of the Old Man of the Mountains, sculptured out
of the granite cliffs at Franconia Knock. In the previous
two episodes, we've looked at how what we know about
memory and regression. Hypnosis raised serious doubts about Betty and
(01:23):
Barney Hill's story of alien abduction, but these doubts don't
apply to the parts of the September trip that Betty
and Barney remembered before hypnosis. Dr Benjamin Simon, who conducted
the hypnosis sessions with the Hills said that while he
believed the memories from hypnosis were from Betty's dreams, something
(01:45):
had actually happened that night. The question is what I'm
Toby Ball and this is strange. Arrivals Episode seven, motion parallax.
(02:13):
The Hills planned to spend the night of September in Montreal.
They'd driven about two hours that morning from a motel
west of Montreal and became lost in the city before
deciding to drive eight hours through the night to their
home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. UFO researcher Robert Shaefer one
(02:34):
thing that people don't often note is that they had
been driving for a very long time. I think they
had been on the road, like twelve hours or more,
and if you talk about distracted drivers, that concern certainly
applies here. Betty at first saw a light that seemed
to be following them, and she was convinced that it
(02:58):
was a UFO. Her excitedness gradually got Barney to be
excited as well. The first stop they made to get
a better look at this light was just north of
Franconian Notch State Park. From episode one, Kathleen Martin, as
she watched this, and it grew larger and larger. She
(03:20):
became very curious, so south of Twin Mountain, she asked
Barney to stop by the side of the road. This
was at the Mount Cleveland picnic area, and they got
out of the car with binoculars and looked up at
this thing in the sky. There's this period of time
when they are south of Lancaster, New Hampshire, until they
(03:42):
get close to Cannon Mountain, when the light is a
long way off but seems to be getting closer and
is moving around in the sky. There are two possible
explanations for this that I want to talk about. The
most common among skeptics is that at this point in
the journey, Eddie is seeing the planet Jupiter. But why
(04:03):
would she think it was moving and getting closer. Robert Schaeffer,
followed by skeptoid host Brian dunning Well, the road curves
and the mountains are there hiding and revealing the Moon
and Jupiter and anything else that they might be looking at.
Is very common in the in the history of the
(04:23):
UFO sightings and even at the present time. But people
say this object was following us. It was moving from
one side of the road to the other. But again,
you know, many roads, especially in mountainous areas, do not
go on a straight line. They curved back and forth.
It's very easy to get confused about, you know, what
direction you're looking at something that isn't really in question.
(04:43):
That's a very common thing, amount you know, UFO sightings.
I am persuaded that that is a very good explanation
for the white light that they saw in the sky.
I have had similar experiences myself. I've done a lot
of sailing, and when you see a light in the
distance and your on a boat and the boat's moving,
the illusion that it's the light that's moving and not
(05:04):
you can be extremely persuasive. I do think that that
is a sufficient explanation for the white light that they reported.
I've heard that people do get confused by planets at night,
but I still have a hard time believing that this
misidentification of Jupiter is the beginning of the Hill encounter.
(05:25):
Even fatigued driving dark, lonely roads at night, I just
can't picture it. I attended a meeting of the Granite
State Skeptics, a group in New Hampshire that gets together
once a month to discuss paranormal phenomena. I brought up
that I didn't quite buy the Jupiter explanation. One of
(05:47):
the people there, a retired Air Force officer named Steve Lundquist,
had a story. So this is really about being an
expert witness and people knowing or should know better, and
they can still make mistakes. So just talking about myself personally,
air Force pilot over three thousand hours and jets flying
(06:09):
all over the world, amateur astronomer, and you know, in
the Air Force you even get courses on you know,
aviation weather and all those sort of things. So with
that sort of a background, you know, you'd think I'd
know better. But one time we were in the Middle
East and we were flying along mission and it was
(06:30):
you know, the typical old dark thirty and we're flying
towards Saudi Arabia and we see an aircraft in front
of us, and you know, it's hard to tell exactly
what kind of aircraft it is. You know, if it's
by its brightness and it's really far away, it's probably
a big one. But if it's closer, it's probably a
small one. And we didn't think much of it until
(06:52):
we noticed that it was climbing and after a while
it climbed pretty high, and since we couldn't paint it
on ray are, we figured it was far away, so
it must have been a large aircraft and far away.
We're looking at the altitude that it's getting to and
we're figuring to ourselves, no US aircraft can reach these altitudes.
It just can't. Trigonometry actually came into the whole equation,
(07:15):
you know. We put its existent to see what the
angle was, and we're like, wow, this thing is like
up there like a hundred and twenty thousand feet. Nothing
can do that. And of course as we're flying along,
we're like, going, jee's a wax is awfully quiet tonight too? Yeah, one,
what's up? Why is that? What's going on? Now? If
(07:36):
I've gone back and reported to people we saw this airplane,
it was doing things no aircraft we know of can do,
you know, And then we said it was a UFO.
You'd probably believe me because you know, I'm an Air
Force pilot, I fly, I no astronomy, I'm an engineer,
I have top secret clearance all that stuff. You believe me, right.
(07:56):
We thought about it a little bit more and we
came to realize it actually was Venus. But because we've
been looking for traffic. You know, when you're flying, you're
always looking for what you might run into. Open the sky,
we fixated on it's an aircraft. This bright light in
the sky is another airplane. We don't want to hit it.
(08:19):
And even though it was starting to do things no
other aircraft can do, in our minds, still stayed as
an aircraft as opposed to Venus. Classic mistake of Venus
as an aircraft. And it's like I should have known better,
and I still made that mistake. There's another explanation that
(08:41):
I find still more convincing, brought to us by Jim McDonald.
I write science fiction novels. I'm a magician, I'm an E. M. T.
And I live here in the north country of Namshure.
Jim's explanation relies on some of the same principles as
the Jupiter explanation, but comes to a different conclusion about
(09:02):
the source of the light. One day on the September,
to make it exactly the right date, my wife and
my daughter and I all drove down Route three, following
Betty and Barney's route, with a copy of Interrupted Journey,
which my wife was reading aloud while I took time
kicks and mileage measurements and discovered some interesting things. Remember,
(09:27):
The Interrupted Journey is the book written by John Fuller
that first told the story of the Hill's journey and
their sessions with Dr Benjamin Simon. Just south of Lancaster,
when you cross up on the shoulder of Mount Prospect
Corrigan Hill, that's the first spot that Betty and Barney
saw their UFO. They're flying saucer. And when you cross
(09:50):
the crest of Mount Prospect, same exact spot, that's the
first place that you can see the warning light on
the top of Camon Mountain. Immediately after seeing the UFO,
it began to move rapidly straight up. It was like
a shooting star, only it fell up, I think is
the quote. Immediately after you cross the shoulder of Mountain Prospect,
(10:12):
US three goes down a nine grade for the next
half mile, pointed directly at Cannon Mountain, and that aircraft
warning light apparently moves straight up. Well, that flying saucer,
Betting and Barney's disappeared on one side of the road,
reappeared on the other. It was sometimes high, sometimes low,
just like that aircraft warning light. They're flying saucer got larger,
(10:36):
brighter and closer the farther south they went, and so
does the aircraft warning line gets larger, brighter and closer.
I said to myself, my golly, I think I'm seeing
their UFO right now. Actually I had already said that
because I've made the connection. I've made the connection years before,
but now I was testing out for sure. And we
get to the sighting that really clinches everything. Bet and
(11:00):
Barney are the foot of Cannon Mountain. They're looking up
the top of Cannon Mountain and they're seeing the lights
at the tramway station. There is a aerial tramway, the
first one in America started, goes up the side of
the mountain. At the upper tramway house, there is a
snack bar and there's lights you can see from the road.
Betty and Barney reported seeing those lights of the snack bar,
(11:23):
and they reported seeing the their UFO. They're flying saucer
at the same time. As you stand at the foot
of Cannon Mountain on the side of the Root three,
looking up at the top of the mountain, you see
the lights at the top of the tramway and you
see the aircraft warning light so Betty and Barney they're
looking at the aircraft warning light, their point at the
aircraft warning light, and they're saying, that's it. That's the
(11:45):
flying saucer. I mean case closed right there. Strange arrivals
will return in a moment. This illusion of the lights
(12:09):
on top of Cannon Mountain moving when in fact it
is the car that is moving, is made further convincing
by an effect called motion parallax Mark Ken from the
University of New Hampshire. Other things that night include seeing
the light which other people have said that is simply
(12:29):
a the beacon from a ski resort, and the fact
that it seemed to follow them is absolutely perfectly in
line with a depth cue called motion parallax, where you
see things closer they are, the faster they moved, the
further away they are, the slower they move. This was
at a distance away, so it appeared to kind of
follow their car, but it was at not the distance
(12:51):
away that the stars were, so it was moving differently
from the stars, so it could look really weird if
you don't know what you're looking at. Route three runs
about two and eighty miles from the Canadian border in
New Hampshire, south to Boston. The main events of the
hill siding took place over a distance of about a
(13:13):
dozen miles from the Mount Cleveland Scenic Area to somewhere
around the Indian Head Resort. This stretch takes you from
just north of Franconia Notch through the notch itself, with
mountains on either side, including Cannon Mountain and The Old
Man in the Mountain on the right, and Mount Lafayette
(13:33):
on the left. After about seven miles in the notch,
Route three exits into the lower hills, including the area
around Indian Head. On a November afternoon, I drove this
route that Betty and Barney took. It struck me that
so much has changed since. Once you enter Franconia Notch,
(13:57):
it's hard to feel like you are really recreate aiding
their journey with any sort of precision. The path Route
three takes follows the same course north of the notch
at the Mount Cleveland picnic area and south of the
Notch around Indian Head, but the section that goes through
the notch itself has been merged with the newer Root
(14:19):
ninety three and takes a slightly different course. The Old
Man in the Mountain has also changed. It was a
naturally formed rock outcropping that, when viewed at the right angle,
as it was by thousands and thousands of tourists every year,
looked like the craggy profile of an old man. It's
(14:40):
gone now collapsing on May third, two thousand and three,
but it was there in and the Hills reportedly used
that profile to estimate the size of the UFO. So
they entered Franconian Notch, driving south, with Cannon Mountain on
their right. Most skeptics agree that at this point, even
(15:03):
if she had previously been seeing Jupiter, Betty is looking
at the lights on the summit of Cannon Mountain. Barney
is driving. Once they are in the notch, they stop
at some point near the Old Man in the mountain.
They get out of the car to look at the UFO.
It is now close enough to be recognizable as a
(15:25):
craft of some sort, not just a light. They stopped
again at the base of the Old Man of the mountain.
They got out and they looked up at this thing
again through binoculars. As they're watching it, it appeared to
be lighted on only one side, and it appeared to
be rotating. It's here that the story becomes more incredible.
(15:49):
A planet or a summit light are no longer adequate explanations.
My name is Travis Roy. I run Grand State Skeptics.
I spent about a year researching the Betting and Barney
Hill abduction and going to the archives at U n
H to look through all the original documentation, and in
(16:12):
my day job, i am a I T guy. Travis
realized that the moment at which the Hills UFO became
more than a light is the same time that they
were near the Cannon Mountain Tramway. The Old Man in
the Mountain Historic site is right where Cannon Mountain Aerial
(16:32):
Tramway is. Then you have Cannon Mountain to the southwest
of that, and then it's about six and a half
miles to get to Indian Head Resort. So if you're
talking three miles up from Indian Head, you can see
the top of Cannon Mountain. It's not until you get
within like a mile or two of Indian Head that
(16:53):
you can't see it. So if they saw something at
the Old Man of the Mountain site, and then on
the way towards Indian Head, they pulled over and looked
through binoculars and saw something. It seems totally plausible to
me that they would have saw the Cannon Mountain Tramway
and then they the next thing they saw driving down
(17:14):
the road would have been Indian Head Resort, which makes sense.
That's how I would explain it too, if it happened
to me and the Hills description of the UFO seems
similar to the appearance of the tram car that was
used in the early nineteen sixties. If you look at
the picture of the craft, it looks kind of like
(17:35):
the old tramway, not the current one, but the one
that existed at the time. It's much more boxy than
your typical UFO that you think of as a flying saucer,
and it had things protruding from the sides. But I
mean that could be the way the lights are, or
it could have been reflections on something. It could have
(17:56):
been anything, but the actual craft piece of it, where
it has the body of the craft and the windows
and the figures inside, looks very similar to what the
Cannon Tramway looked like at the time. The Cannon Mountain
Tramway was built in It was the first aerial passenger
(18:17):
tramway in North America. The base station for the tramway
is just a few hundred yards from the Old Man
in the Mountain parking lot. There's now a gift store
where the viewing area once was. One skeptical theory is
that Betty and Barney expected to see a UFO, saw
(18:38):
the tram car and were confused. On the face of it,
it's not such a far fetched idea. One of the
hard things about trying to recreate what happened during that
brief time is that it is not clear where they
stopped after the Mount Cleveland Scenic Area. They could have
pulled over at any point around the Old Man in
(18:59):
the mountain. If they were north of the tramway, It's
entirely possible that the tram car passed in front of
their view of the Old Man. There aren't many visual
cues there to determine distance. In the darkness, especially when
looking through binoculars, the tram car would have seemed bigger
compared to the Old Man because it would have been
(19:21):
much closer to where Betty and Barney had stopped. The
problem is that there's no evidence that the tram was
running at that late hour. It was well after the
last scheduled tourist run. The restaurant at the top of
Cannon Mountain was closing around that time, so maybe it
(19:43):
was being used to bring down staff or something like that,
but there's no record of it from the old man
in the mountain. They continued south for a few miles,
briefly stopping at times, and eventually encountering the craft in
the field near Indian Head. This is where Barney saw
the figures in the craft looking back at him. He
(20:07):
took his binoculars, helped him up to his eyes and
looked up at this object. He could see a lighted
row of windows that seemed to be around the front
part of this craft. Gazing back at him were between
eight and eleven figures inside the craft. The skeptical explanation
(20:28):
begins with Betty and Barney's fatigue and stress. They've been
on the road for hours. Betty in particular, thinks they
are being followed by a UFO. Her nervousness is affecting
Barney because they are not thinking clearly, they misconstrue whatever
they see near Indian Head. With this in mind, Travis
(20:52):
Roy speculates about what they might have seen. I've done
that drive and you can't see Cannon Mountain from the
Indian Head Resort. You can see it from a small
drive north. The distance isn't that much, And that goes
back to what I said about how it's really hard
(21:12):
to tell exactly where you are. The other thing, too,
is is that and they're retelling of it. They pulled
over at one point at Indian Head and Barney went
across the street and looked at the craft through binoculars. Now,
if they were doing that, I mean Indian Head Resort
was there during that time, there would have been other
people around there. I mean, even in the middle of
(21:34):
the night, there's still like the hotel staff and stuff,
and there would have been lights on and everything else.
So I really don't think that that's where they stopped
to look at the craft, because if they saw that,
wouldn't you have gone into the hotel for help or like,
I'm seeing this crazy thing. I think that it happened
(21:55):
north of Indian Head before they got there, and they
just say at it's Indian Head because that was the
next landmark that they hit. There is a problem with
this explanation. Betty actually describes passing the Indian Head Resort
before they have the encounter in the field because they
(22:16):
are traveling from north to south. If you are sure
that Betty is right about the sequence of events, this
doesn't fit Travis's timeline. Jim McDonald has an alternate explanation
for this part of the story, which is consistent with
Betty's sequence of events. He believes that the encounter in
(22:37):
the field happened in Woodstock, about eight miles south of
the Indian Head Resort. They continue on south and here
comes the really horrible part of this. They get down
to Woodstock where you find the jack O lanterns, which
back in the early sixties had a large inflatable, glowing
(22:59):
red or orange spherical jack lantern up on the roof
of the motel, and this got inflated in their minds
with the glowing red orange moon with the white aircraft
warning light on the top of Cannon Mountain, and it
is my belief that this is the point where they
leaped out of their cars were running around the field,
and that later under hypnotic regression, became the abduction site.
(23:24):
Later on, months later, when they were trying to find
the place where they were abducted, they didn't find it,
and they decided it must have been near Indian Heads somewhere,
because it had to have been south of Franconian Notch.
But it's notoriously difficult to find again during daylight someplace
that you've only seen at night and memory is weird.
(23:45):
Could this be the place? Yes, this was the place.
It is the place, and it became fixed. Robert Shaffer
doesn't even point to any particular physical object for him,
their exhaustion and excitement are explanation enough. Once they finally
reached the state where they were both very excited and
(24:06):
frightened when they got to this area called the Indian Head,
which is like a profile on them, a mountain like
the Old Man of the Mountain used to be. I'm
not sure what they were seeing at certain times there,
but yeah, they neither one of them was any longer
in a rational state of mind at that point. Fatigue
and fear do a lot of heavy lifting in these explanations.
(24:29):
Without these two factors, they aren't very convincing. If you
are predisposed to think that the Hills were abducted, you
probably don't buy them. But it's important to keep in
mind that even if you don't accept any of these explanations.
The default is not an alien spaceship. In fact, the
(24:50):
burden of proof is with the proponents of the Hills story.
Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What we
have is a great story, but little in the way
of convincing proof that had happened. This applies to the
physical evidence that Betty and Barney had at the end
(25:11):
of their trip. Remember how Kathleen Martin described Betty's torn
dress and Barney's scuff shoes. According to the abduction story,
these happened when the Hills were being brought through the
woods to the spacecraft. Is there another explanation? So what
else do we have. We've got Betty's dress, which was torn.
(25:34):
I have no idea how she tore her dress. There's
lots of ways to tear a dress, particularly leaping in
and out of a car in Fields and New Hampshire
in the middle of the night. The dress developed a
white powder on it some years later, which exactly resembles mold,
and barney shoes were scuffed, easy enough to do with
(25:55):
a stick shift car, gas pedal, brake, pedal and clutch,
and while leaping in and out of a car in
open Fields, New Hampshire, in the middle of the night.
Jim McDonald did not mention the broken binocular strap, but
presumably the same explanation would apply. The strap gets snagged
(26:15):
on the door, perhaps as Barney jumps out of the car,
which leaves the most compelling and most frustrating piece of
physical evidence, the shiny spots on the trunk of their car.
Remember Betty took a compass out to the car and
when she placed it on the round shiny spots, the
(26:35):
needle spun. There does not appear to have been any
further investigation. This is Betty and Barney on the David
Schumberg Show. We discussed the spots with Ball to Live
and with Mr Harman and Mr Jackson, But we have
spent ours discussing this, and then it was just over
(26:59):
on the at leaving when I left us. We just
took out to show them to exam into Mr Webb,
maybe John who was Yes, I did, and Walder Webb
simply throws up his hand and discussed his own failure
as an investigator. I am convinced in my own own
line and nothing was hidden and it was simply a
(27:20):
very serious oversight. And he agrees that it was Ed
Dalson of World Journal Tribune O those spots still there,
and if not were what happened to them? The spots
gradually wore away over the winter months, and we don't
have the can they have. Dr Benjamin Simon, who conducted
(27:41):
the hypnosis sessions with the Hell's was confounded by this
failure to examine the spots. Can't be one of the
greatest mistakes I have ever seen. That is that the
vir was assignedists and there was the story of the
silver spots outside of Silvergonald in the back of their car,
(28:04):
which they said at the time, Uh, we're still on
the car, and God don't what reasons he never went
out to look at It was an opportoint you to
see one single objective thing, you know, we've never had
a single objective thing. In the end, what might have
been the most intriguing piece of evidence to emerge from
(28:26):
this whole encounter was left unexamined. It seems incredible that
this trunk, which could have been the critical proof of
an alien encounter, was ignored and left to the elements.
But that's what happened. So what we are left with
our questions about time to begin with both Betty's and
(28:50):
Barney's watches stopped working that night and never worked again.
More importantly, none of what we've heard accounts for their
arriving home two hours later than they had expected. What
about the missing time next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange
(29:14):
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 Rickike. Barney
Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to the
(29:37):
Miln Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire,
John Horrigan, w y Am in Norwich, Connecticut, John White,
and David O'Leary, the executive producer of The History Channel's
dramatic series Project Bluebook. Learn more about the show over
at Grimm and Mile dot com. For more podcasts from
(29:58):
I Heart Radio Physic, the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
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