Regressed

Betty and Barney Hill's memories of being abducted by aliens were recovered through hypnotic regression. But does this technique uncover actual memories, or something else? How does what we know now about memory formation and hypnosis change how we look at the Hills' story of capture aboard an alien craft?

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild Some Aaron Manky, go Tellahu talk to
you tonight? Five General Food. Hello, here's your host Dall
to tell the crows call you? Why do one of

(00:25):
these beings? Right now? Let's meet our first team of challenge.
What is your name? Please? My name is Bonnie Hill.
My name is Barney Hill. My name is Bonnie Hill.
Let's start the questioning with Arson B and Arson Number two?

(00:47):
How tall were these humanoid creatures? Well? They were short
five nine or five ten at the most. Number three?
Did they speak English? Not in an actual speaking type voice?
It was something like thought transferred? Number one? What physical
symptoms did you later? Notice? What's what's is tom? Number one?

(01:09):
Where you were alert when you were in the ship
and awake? Uh? More like in a sim nabilistic states.
Number two when they examined you, did they stick needles
in you? Not needles? Needle? Remember when did they stick
a needle in Betty too? Yes, they stuck a needle
in Betty? Were they like our needles? Number one? I
didn't say the needle? Were they the same build as us?

(01:31):
I mean, you know, how did they like have pointy
heads or something. No, they had large cranium and the
chin was very small, wouldn't you know it? That's all
the time we had, which we did have more fascinating story.
So mark a ballace, if you will please, without any consultation,
and of course without changing once you have marked Tom.

(01:53):
For whom did you vote? I voted for number one,
but I couldn't tell anything from the stories that they
each told. But he looked like the kind of man
who would have binoculars handy in his car, Beggy Cat.
I voted for number one because they had big kids
in me seating chins and wouldn't you know it's arsen
I think that there's two great liars up there. And

(02:15):
I had no way of judging except that the whole
thing took place around New England. And when I asked
Number one about the warts, he said watch they had watched.
And I'm from New England too, and I noticed watches, watches,
watch votes are all in mind's made up, as you heard,
and all let's find out which one of these three
gentlemen in truth is Barney Hill. Well, the real Barney Hill,

(02:39):
please stand up on this episode of To Tell the Truth,
the panelists were able to identify number one as the
real Barney Hill, and both here and elsewhere, he was

(03:01):
telling the truth as he saw it, but some of
this truth involved memories that were revealed during his hypnosis
sessions with Dr Benjamin Simon. This brings up an important
question in evaluating the Hills experience. How much can you
rely on memories recovered through hypnotic regression? Simply put, is

(03:22):
hypnosis a reliable tool for bringing back memories? I'm Toby
Ball and this is Strange Arrivals Episode five regressed Betty

(03:53):
and Barney underwent their hypnosis treatment with Dr Benjamin Simon.
We now have a much better understanding of how hypnosis works.
Hosted the Skeptic Podcast Bryan Dunning. So this is actually
what originally got me into this because I was working
on another subject at the time, which was the whole
topic of hypnotic regression in general. And these recovered memories

(04:18):
and the Betty Varney Hill story is kind of a
classic example of what we think of as these recovered
memories under hypnosis. It's now no longer the nineteen sixties,
it's now the two thousand teens, and we now have
very solid evidence that there is no such thing as
hypnotic regression or recovered repressed memories. That's just simply not

(04:41):
a part of psychology. That body of evidence is extraordinarily robust.
We see things like a court cases being overturned and
stuff based on kind of the modern science of hypnosis
and psychology. Hypnotic regression came to the public attention in
the nine teen eighties and nineties. At this time, some

(05:03):
psychiatric professionals were working with patients, often children, to quote
unquote recover memories of sexual abuse. One outcome of this
movement was a rash of claims that sexual abuse rituals
were being organized by groups of Satanists. The so called
Satanic panic was eventually fully discredited and hypnotic regression along

(05:25):
with it. Author freelance writer and skeptical investigator Robert Schaffer,
and this whole business about recovered memories. If you recall
back in the late eighties and early nineties, it was
a big thing to hypnotize people that allegedly repressed memories

(05:46):
of sexual abuse, usually or some other trauma, but for
the most party, it was sexual abuse, and it was
there was just a huge controversy over this, so many people,
you know, we're claiming to have recovered such memories, either
with or without hypnosis. And when somebody you know, claimed
to recover this, they had, you know, there were support groups.

(06:10):
It was a big thing. Innocent people got accused of
terrible crimes based only on so called recovered memories, and
the whole thing. Again, it's a very sad chapter. It's
a very embarrassing chapter. Nobody in serious academia today takes
any of this, you know, recovered memories as as anything

(06:33):
more than likely a fantasy. It's it's possible that maybe
some of it might be true, or somebody remembers something,
but again there's just no way to tell. I don't
do hypnosis with people, but I have studied the literature
on hypnotically refreshed memories. This is Elizabeth Loftis. I am

(06:57):
a professor at the University of California the Irvine, the
Irvine Campus. She's also one of the foremost experts on
human memory. One of the things that you can say
about hypnosis it it might be helpful to somebody who
wants to try to use it to lose weight or
stop smoking or be less anxious, But when it comes

(07:17):
to using hypnosis to try to to dig up allegedly
buried trauma memories. That's when you've got to be really,
really careful, because under the influence of hypnosis, especially if
you're highly hypnotize herbal you are even more susceptible to
contamination and distortion. And then when you produce something in

(07:40):
this hypnotic state, you have a tendency to believe, well,
if I thought about it under hypnosis, it must have
really happened to you become even more confident about it,
whether it's true or not. Did you catch the part
where Dr Loftis said that people who are easily hypnotized
are also highly suggestible. In nineties sixty four, when Dr

(08:01):
Simon conducted his sessions with the Hills, this connection was unknown.
In an undated document in the University of New Hampshire
Special Archives titled Hypnosis Betty basically braggs about how hypnotizable
she and Barney were. She writes at the end of
the sessions, Dr Simon said that both of us were

(08:24):
very good subjects who were able to reach a very
deep trance quickly and easily. The depth of our trances
was unusual, a level where only one person out of
millions might be able to reach the fact that both
of us were able to do this was outstanding that

(08:46):
we were two out of millions with the abilities to
do this. Even if we allow for some hyperbole, we
have it from Betty that Dr Simon considered them good subjects.
We now know this would also make them highly suggestible.
This is not to say that Dr Simon planted memories
during these hypnosi successions. He was an experienced and a

(09:09):
highly respected psychiatrist, but it does raise the possibility that
they weren't necessarily remembering actual events. Do you remember in
the first episode we heard some audio from one of
Barney's hypnos secessions. What struck me was how emotional Barney
became when he described seeing the aliens looking at him
from the windows of the UFO. I'm thinking my head away,

(09:35):
God give all right, yes, God gotta get away. Oh oh, alright,

(09:59):
I'm getting way. Would someone under hypnosis react with such
strong emotion to something that never actually happened? Just at
an intuitive level, it seems as though a false memory
wouldn't create that kind of dramatic fear response. Again, Elizabeth
loftus one of the questions that researchers have wondered about

(10:22):
is whether people would be emotional about false memories the
way they can sometimes be emotional about true memories. And
the psychologist psychology professor Richard McNally has actually studied the
emotional reactions of people who believe they were abducted by aliens.
And what he has found and shown in a beautiful

(10:45):
study is that when people are thinking about their abduction experiences,
they are highly emotional. You measure their heart rate or
their their skin resistance or those physiological measures. They are
as aroused and upset when they think about these experiences
as other people are when they're thinking about truly traumatic

(11:07):
experiences that have happened to them. And so mcnali concludes,
and I would concur based on some work that I've done,
that emotional reaction is certainly no guarantee of authenticity, that
people can be very emotional about false memories. Our current

(11:27):
understanding of hypnosis and recovered memories is far more skeptical
than it was in We know now that hypnosis is
not a tool by which people can recall the exact
details of past events. We also know that so called
repressed memories are not reliable part of this has to
do with how hypnosis works, but it also has to

(11:48):
do with how memory itself is constructed and then retrieved.
We like to say that memory doesn't work like a
recording device, like a video recorder. You don't just red
or did and play it back. The process is much
more complex and actually when we are remembering, we're essentially
constructing or reconstructing the experience, and that means we are

(12:11):
taking bits and pieces of information, sometimes acquired at different
times and places, and bringing it together to construct what
what feels like a memory, because that's what it feels like,
right that you are remembering things as they actually happened,
But you aren't. Your memories are the product of a

(12:31):
number of factors, which include the reality of what happened,
but other things as well, memories of far more or
I should say, remembering is a far more active process.
This is Dr Mark Kenn, principal lecturer at the University
of New Hampshire, among others. He's had a course on

(12:52):
paranormal and other extraordinary beliefs. Every time you're telling that story,
as you're saying, if you've told it a hundred times,
the hundredth time you're telling it. You're remembering the ninety
nine time you told it. In the ninety time, you're
remembering the time you told it. And so we have
a several biases in there. We we have a bias

(13:14):
that makes us more the focus of the story, so
the things that happened to us are more prominent. We
have a bias that puts the memories in line with
what we believe about ourselves now. So even if we
have changed tremendously since that time, that story is going
to fit who we are now. There's a number of
other ones that stories tend to, as you say, streamline

(13:37):
and fit a storyline better than the fragmented way that
we might remember it initially. But there's a lot of time.
I mean, people remember things that they can't possibly have remembered.
They remember things that in fact did not happen. My
brother remembered stories about being born. He didn't. He remembered

(13:57):
people telling him stories about that. Trying often we will,
we will remember something as having happened to us when well, wait, no,
we heard about that from somebody else. It's just that
we imagined it so vividly that it became part of
our own autobiographical memory. People will remember something happened, and

(14:22):
in fact it was a TV show. The function of
memory is to be able to have stuff that happened
at time one help us at time too. There's absolutely
nothing about that that means it has to be accurate.
And in fact, if biases are going to help us
learn from the stuff that happened back then, to condense it,

(14:43):
to make it simple so that we can react more quickly,
then they're very useful, uh, to be able to say, oh,
instead of there's all this this, this weirdness and random
stuff that's happening back there, so I don't quite know
how to make use of it. Nope, there's a story
in it. Boom, I can make use of it now.

(15:04):
Strange arrivals will return in a moment. It's a difficult
thing to contemplate that memories that seem so real, so vivid,

(15:28):
are not necessarily what happened. There are mental recreations that
change over time due to a number of factors, new
perceptions about oneself, incorrect details that found their way into
the last time you told the story, and the instinct
to create a narrative out of the fragments from which
memories created. Memories can be vivid, but that does not

(15:49):
equate to being accurate. And there's another thing. Memories can
be influenced, altered, or even made up by external sources
after the fact. That is, memory is not only fairly unreliable,
but it is also easily corrupted. What we have shown
is out there in the real world, well, we're exposed

(16:11):
to misinformation. I don't know you could even say frequently.
We get misinformation when we talk to other people, or
when we overhear other witnesses being interviewed, or what when
we're asked a suggestive or leading questions by somebody who's
interrogating us. When we are exupposed to media coverage about

(16:32):
some event that we might have experienced. All of these
provide an opportunity for new information to become available to
a witness and to potentially produce a contamination of distortion
in the witnesses memory. I asked Dr loftis how malleable
people's memories really are. One of the things that I

(16:54):
and my collaborators have done is to expose people two events,
maybe a simulated crime or accident, and then we feed
them some misinformation about the event, and we look to
see the extent at which they will accept this misinformation
and it will alter or transform their memory. And so

(17:18):
we have found that you can show people an accident,
for example, where a car goes to a yield sign,
and you can feed the misinformation that it was a
stop sign, and many people will claim that what they
actually saw was the stop sign. They fall for the
misinformation and it in essence becomes their memory. That's one

(17:41):
type of study that we have done showing that it's
pretty easy to change people's memories for the details of
events that they actually did experience. Details can be altered,
I asked Dr loftis entirely new details could be created
from suggestion? Can you lead someone to believe in something

(18:02):
that wasn't there or didn't happen? You can add objects
to memory. We've added objects to the memories of soldiers
who were being interrogated. We made them believe they saw
telephones or weapons in interrogation rooms when they didn't exist.
All through suggestive supplying of new information after some event

(18:27):
is over keep this concept in mind that through suggestive
supplying of new information, you can make people believe that
they are remembering things that weren't there or didn't happen.
I talked to al Jundra Rojas, the host of Open
minds UFO Radio. He also writes about UFOs and the paranormal.

(18:50):
You know my attempt, and luckily, I think making my
credits will agree I'm pretty good at it. Is that
I try to take a journalistic approach, so I try
to cover all sides and give all the facts available
so people have more of an unbiased kind of overview
of the phenomena or whatever it is that topic that

(19:11):
I'm covering in this arena. Here he talks about Betty
and Barney and the stories they told while under hypnosis.
You know, these two individuals under hypnosis and by you know,
I believe a credible hypnotist who wasn't really you know,
trying to guide them. They had very similar stories, even

(19:33):
though they were regressed separately. I think that's the most
compelling piece as far as evidence goes. This is the
other mystery about the Hills hypnosis sessions. If you are
a skeptic, how do you account for Betty and Barney
separately telling essentially the same story. Dr Simon went so
far as to have them forget what they disclosed so

(19:55):
they could not talk to each other about them between
the weekly sessions. So we put, if the abduction didn't happen,
how could their memories of it be so similar. This
is Robert Schaeffer, followed by Brian Dunning. The whole idea
of you know, this alien contact and being stopped and
so on, that idea was not there originally. That's in

(20:16):
the hypnosis part of the story. What happened was they
met with the number, talked with a number of upologists.
They loved to tell the story. Betty loved to tell
the story to people who wanted to listen to her
about what she saw. And at that point it was
a UFO sighting. It wasn't an abduction or or or
an alien encounter. And it was only after then she

(20:38):
started to have these dreams in her dream she was abducted.
She did meet up with aliens, and she told her
dreams to people, and then somebody suggested, well, maybe it
wasn't a dream, maybe it really happened. And so then
when later when they went to doctor Simon, and really
the reason that both of them went to see Dr
Simon was they were having especially Barney was was very nervous.

(21:02):
He was having trouble sleeping, he was having ulcers. Frankly,
he was in quite a state, and so then Dr
Simon hypnotized both of them. I think the most significant
point about it is that this hypnotic regression didn't happen
for almost two and a half years after the supposed event,

(21:23):
and a lot of people don't realize that. A lot
of people think, oh, they went in the next day
and had their hypnosis and told the same story in
these separate rooms where they hadn't had time to corroborate
and get their stories straight. That's not the case at all.
So for more than two years, Betty had been writing
down this version of her story in tremendous detail, writing
and rewriting and editing it, telling it to Barney over

(21:47):
and over and over again. Is it any surprised that
their stories were similar once they went under hypnosis. Once
you get to that part of it and you see,
oh my gosh, there goes the whole hypnos just part
of the story. Just there's nothing interesting or surprising about
it at all. Anymore, the question becomes did Betty tell

(22:07):
Barney about her dreams? If so, this would explain why
their stories were essentially two perspectives on the same narrative.
This came up during the March hypnosis session when Dr
Simon questioned Barney about the basis for his tale of
alien abduction. This is from the transcript of that session

(22:28):
as read by actors. Somebody told you about this before
that in some way? Who was that? Betty? My wife? Yeah?
And how did she tell you about it? She would
say that she had a dream, and that a dream
was that she had been taken aboard a UFO, and

(22:48):
that I was also in a dream, I was taken
a boat. Yeah, but you told me that she didn't
speak to you about this. How did she tell you this?
She would tell me this from usually when someone would
ask us about our sighting of a UFO, and then
she would mention this, and I just told her it

(23:09):
was a dream and nothing to get alarmed about. Did
she tell you all of the details? Can you tell
me all of the details of what happened to her?
She would tell me a great many of the details
of her dreams, but she was not certain to the
location where we had stopped. And she would tell me

(23:29):
she had gone into this UFO and had talked with
the people there on board and she was told she
would forget in her dreams, she would forget about this,
and she said she would tell me that she was
determined that she would not forget. That she told these

(23:53):
people in this UFO that she would not forget. And
this is the way she would tell me of her dreams.
And I told her they were only dreams, and that
I can't believe whatever these dreams are that she is having,
only that she is having nightmares if they are frightening,

(24:15):
and she said, no, they are not frightening. It's just
that she feels that somehow there is some connection between
her dreams, because she never dreamed of UFOs before. And
she would tell me that they had stuck something in
her navel, causing great pain, and that just the wave

(24:38):
of the hand, this pain disappeared. And she was not
telling this to me, but I would be present while
she was telling it to friends of ours, or to
Walter Webb. Whenever we would see him, he would ask
us about the UFO sighting that we had had. In

(24:59):
then I would hear of dreams. But never did she
tell this actually to me. Dr Simon himself endorsed the
theory that Barney had been influenced by Betty's dreams, and
that those dreams were the basis for both of their
quote unquote memories recovered through hypnosis. And in October letter

(25:20):
to the prominent UFO researcher Philip Class, Dr Simon writes
the UFO was a citing the abduction did not take place,
but was a reproduction of Betty's dream which occurred right
after the sighting. This was her expression of anxiety. Is
contrasted to Barney's more psychosomatic one. Of course, Dr Simon's
opinion is just that an opinion. It is an evidence,

(25:43):
and just as our understanding of memory and hypnosis has changed,
the concept of alien abduction was unknown at the time.
UFO researcher and physicist Stanton Friedman believes that it was
the unprecedented nature of the Hills experience that led Dr
Simon to discount it. There's no question that Dr Simon
was skeptical of the notion of alien visitors. Everybody was.

(26:09):
You know, we're talking in the sixties, long before we
had gone in the moon, long before we operated nuclear
rocket engines, for example. On the ground, there wasn't a
body of data which would lead most people to think
that this kind of thing could happen. That may be true,

(26:29):
but what we know about regression hypnosis makes Benny and
Barney's abduction seem unlikely. Absent other evidence, the hypnotically recalled
stories really don't prove anything, and we've already seen how
the alien symbols and the star map have at best
questionable value as proof. We'll talk about the physical evidence

(26:50):
torn dress, scuff shoes, and so on in a later episode.
Even in Dr Simon realized that they might very well
be talking about Betty dreams and not a real event.
Where did the line blur between reality and nightmare? Next
time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of

(27:18):
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.
This episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and
produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers
Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was
portrayed by Gina Rickikey. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams.

(27:39):
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 blue Book.
Learn more about the show over at grimm and mil
dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,

(28:04):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.