April 14, 2020 • 33 mins
UFO culture of the 1950s revolved around two competing visions; one of contact with advanced beings from within our solar system and another focusing sightings of distant flying objects in the sky. Under hypnosis, the Hills told a story that differed from both of these narratives, one of capture and examination by truly alien beings.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio
(00:05):
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. We go deeper
and deeper, deeper, sleep for our asleep, deeper and deeper,
(00:26):
fully relaxed, almost as a relaxed, comfortable, relaxed. You will
not be anxious. You are discussed. If you will remember
everything and you will tell me everything. Yes, I think
(00:49):
I will stop, I will stop, all right. The story
that Betty and Barney told under hypnosis was extraordinary, a
tale of alien encounter unlike anything before it, an account
so detailed that the story itself seemed to offer possible
(01:12):
proof that it was more than a delusion. It began
with Barney turning off the highway and onto a rural road.
I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals, Episode three,
(01:42):
What's Yellow. Though the Hill's abduction experience was the first
to become widely known, their supposed case wasn't the first
of its kind. About four years before the couple's experience,
another possible abduction had taken place on a farm in
(02:03):
the Meanest Jerai's region of Brazil. History professor and host
of the sacer Life podcast, Aaron Gullias Antonio villis Bois
in South America. Seven is out in the field and
encounters a a UFO and he's taken aboard it. But
it's not sort of a typical nineteen fifties contact. The experience.
(02:27):
There are strange looking people on the craft and they're
they're human ish, but they're not human um and there's
there's one figure in particular, a he identifies the figures
female with with red hair and a pale body. And
he's taken into a room and medical tests are performed
(02:49):
on him, and he's strapped down and he's naked, and
then he has a sexual encounter with this woman. And
the impression we get from the tale that's told to
a researcher who then tells it to people from the
American Organization a PRO who were the first to sort
of publish an English language sort of report of this
in the late nineteen fifties is that they were extracting seamen,
(03:11):
probably for whatever experimental purpose they had. After the encounter,
hillis BoA's is disoriented, in pain, he's got a headache,
some vision problems, vertigo, all kinds of stuff going on,
and he tells his story and he finds a researcher
and tells him the story. And no matter how many
times he tells his story, it remains remarkably consistent. It's
(03:35):
not from hypnosis, it's from his conscious memory of what
went on. And he's just a regular guy. He's working.
He will eventually go to law school and become a lawyer.
I believe he's got nothing to gain really by telling
this outlandish and frankly embarrassing story. And there's some strange
(03:56):
details in it that are just really interesting. The woman
will call them a woman being on the saucer that
has the sexual encounter with him. She screams like an animal,
so that this this inhuman animalistic noise emanates from her
and greatly disturbs him, and he sort of aroused, sort
of despite himself, and is literally forced into this act.
(04:19):
And it's troubling and it's awkward and it's strange, and
like I said, there's nothing, there's no upside to sharing
this with people, but he does share it. Villis Bois
essentially claimed he was sexually assaulted by a feral spacewoman.
He would say that before they left, this woman rubbed
(04:40):
her belly and pointed up towards the stars. He understood
this to mean that she was taking what would be
their baby back to where she'd come from. Villis Bois
story made it to the US before Betty and Barney
Hill's experience, but it seems very unlikely that either Betty
or Barney would have known of it. Aaron mentioned APRO
(05:00):
for and does again here it's an acritive for the
Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, a UFO research group at the time.
APRO published the story in their newsletter in the late
nineteen fifties, and I think their book, Flying Saucer Occupants
came out in the late fifties or early sixties, and
it's in this book, Flying Saucer Occupants, which was published
(05:22):
in a you know, pocketbook paperback format that was on
all the news stands. That's where most people read about
the story. So as far as the case being well known,
it would have been well known to people who read
UFO books. It would not have been well known to
the general public or people driving down the road in
New Hampshire in the mid sixties. I wouldn't think for
(05:45):
Betty and Barney, though their UFO sighting was different. It
started with a light in the sky, and reached a
climax when they encountered a spaceship near Indian Head. That
story ended when they arrived home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
at least two hours later than they had expected. They
had continuous memory of these events, That is, there was
(06:07):
no perceivable gap between the events and Betty and Barney's
ability to recall them. In the days following the encounter,
Betty had unusually vivid dreams about being aboard a spaceship,
but neither she nor Barney actually remembered anything. The memory
of these events only emerged two years later. During the
(06:30):
first half of nine four, the Hills made the hour
long drive to the Boston office of Dr Benjamin Simon.
During separate hypnosis sessions with Dr Simon, Betty and Barney
told very similar stories about being brought aboard in alien spacecraft.
So what exactly happened to Barney and Betty Hill during
(06:50):
those two missing hours? After Betty and Barney turned off
into the woods, they found themselves in a sort of trance.
They remember being escorted through the woods to where the
UFO waited. Betty said Barney was totally out of it
and provided no resistance. Betty struggled but was no match
(07:13):
for the beings. They were brought up a ramp and
into the ship. Barney from a May nine six radio interview.
I was carried bare with one door into another door,
and there was this room with pie shape, but as
I described it much like a pie with the point
(07:34):
of the pie. And it was just one table that
was very small for my body. I'm about my for
the eight where I like, I got onto the table myself,
and I am continually hearing this voice that is telling
me that no harm is going to come to me.
(07:55):
Is on the amount of you uh tists that are
going to think of solfs to some calm about with
no damaging stuff. The next several clips feature Betty, recorded
decades later in the nineties and nineties. So I went
(08:17):
on board the craft and I went into an unlighted carrada,
and then I was taken into the first room. But
and he was taken into the second room. And at
this point the purposes of identification, I now call him
the leader, but under hypnosis I always refer to him
(08:37):
as the one who speaks English. And so he was
in the room and then they examined it came in
and there were nine others who stayed in the carrada.
I haven't taken into this first room, and it was
like there. It was at small table, it was a stool,
(08:58):
and then the wall the dough they were does in
the wall that would slide back and full. And they
put me on a still, checked my eyes, is nose, throat,
my feet, my hands, and they later would look at
my skin and then they examined. They could two turns
(09:18):
looking at my skin, and they were all the time
they're carrying on this conversation very excited, like in their
own language, which I had never heard before. Then they
said put me on the table and said they wanted
to check my nervous system and they use some special
kind of equipment to do this. UFO researcher and Betty
(09:42):
Hill's niece Kathleen Martin, they were very interested in every
opening in her body, into looking at everything. They were
especially interested in her teeth, their joints. They removed their shoes,
they moved their joints, their fingers, their toes, their arms,
(10:04):
their legs, and then they appeared to have done neurological
testing on Betty and Barney as well. Betty stated that
they had placed a stylish kind of thing on her back.
Betty continues the story from the transcript of her March
four hypnosis session, as read by an actress. So I'm
(10:30):
sitting on the stool and there's this little bracket and
my head is resting against the bracket, and the examina
opened my eyes and he looks in them with a light,
and he opens my mouth and he looks at my
throat and my teeth, and he looks in my ears.
(10:50):
And then he turned my head and he looks in
this here, and then he takes out like a swab
or a q tip. I guess it is like like
they was on abies, and he cleaned out and he
puts it in my left ear, and then he puts
this on another piece of material, and the leader takes
it and he rolls it up and he puts it
(11:11):
in the top drawer too. Then then he feels my
hair and then the back of my neck, and then
they take a couple of strands of my hair and
they pull it out and he gives us to the
leader and he wraps that all up and he puts
that in the top drawer. And then he takes something
that maybe like scissors. I don't know what it is.
(11:35):
And they caught a piece of my hair. Here he
starts feeling behind my years and under my chin, and
down my neck and throw my shoulders around my collar
phone and then they take off my shoes and they
look at my feet, and they look at my hands.
(11:55):
Daddy was taken to this table where they moved her dress.
They did not know how to undo a zipper, and
so they ended up tearing the top of Betty's dress.
And then she showed them how to unzip that zipper.
The dress fell into a pile on the floor and
(12:16):
her slip was pulled up. And then the final test
was they tried to insert a needle like instrument in
my navel. We say some of the pregnancy test that
it caused a great deal of pain, so they stopped
doing this. And this was and at that time we
didn't have any kind of testing like this. It was
(12:39):
like that we developed him. She's talking about amniocentesis, a
test used with pregnant women that can determine the gender
of a fetus, as well as any possible infections or
chromosomal abnormalities. It was under development in but wasn't presented
to the public until Betty, of course, was not pregnant.
(13:06):
It caused so much pain to Betty that she screamed
in agony, and she writhed the leader removed her pain
by doing something up around her head. And generally, the
one that she called the leader that we now call
the escort, who is with experiencers time and time again
(13:30):
when they are taken, is the one who does most
of the communication, is the one who establishes a relationship
with that human subject, and also who removes any pain
or any anxiety or fear that the subject is experiencing.
Dr Simon had to end that session early due to
(13:54):
the degree of trauma that Betty was experiencing. In the
next session that he came to, the physician had left
the room. He had gone to do Barney's examination. Betty
didn't know that at the time, but that's what was
taking place in the next room. Over strange arrivals will
(14:18):
return in a moment. Betty recounted being given a kind
(14:39):
of physical examination, including a painful procedure involving a needle
being inserted in her navel. When the exam was completed,
the being that she called the physician left the room,
though she didn't know it at the time. He'd gone
to see Barney from the radio a new view. I
(15:02):
offered no resistance, No, I love me concerned about Betty's
well aware about I feel a little guilty as a
husbital to not be concerned about my life. But this
is such a terrifying situation that I was already concerned
about myself and I was being assured that I wasn't
going to be hard. So that I was faced on
(15:23):
this table where my jobs were removed, and my shirt
was pulled up with my head which would have made
my back. My under shirt was sold up along with
it where my back would have been there, and I
was turned over on my back and my stomach as
well as uh well, I could feel what I called
(15:46):
a being going up and down the final column. With
this examination, uh, I remembered a plug at my teeth,
and this is the way I described. And also while
in this position of being damned, I opened my eyes
again compleadingly, because I could hear a kind of noise
(16:09):
as if people or someone was talking. I opened my
eyes and I looked, and I saw these three short maths.
And this is when I got a good look at
the face. I immediately closed my eyes because what I
saw was terrifying by standard, it doesn't mean that they
were terrifying. Well, how would you describe yourself? I saw
(16:30):
this kind of grayish color, and wasn't I think, because
most people they're not When saw the little green men,
and they were not green, then they were a grayish,
metallic kind of gray in color. And I might also
say that I'm quite sure they were not wearing a
mask or rather any kind of apparatus over the head
for breathing purposes, because I could see what would have
(16:53):
been about a thin line without a lip muffle, that
when potty went open, there was a membrane inside that
fluttered really right at the end of the month itself,
and it fluttered. And this seems to be a way
that they communicated with one another with a very peculiar
kind of properly. This is from the transcript of Barney's
(17:19):
February twenty ninth session, as read by an actor. I
was buying on a table and my flyer was open,
and I thought, are they putting the cup around my
private parts? And then stopped and I thought, how funny.
(17:44):
I thought, how funny if I keep real quiet and
real still. I won't be harmed, and it will be over,
and I will just stay here and pretend that I
am anywhere, and think of God and think of Jesus,
and think I am not afraid. They also examined Barney's
(18:06):
mouth and found something that surprised them. They rushed to
Betty's room to get more information. They came running into
the room, some of them, and they had dentures in
their hands. Well, I guess. When they checked Barney's mouth,
they noticed that his teeth were removable, but Betty's were not.
So they were very curious about what was going on,
(18:28):
and they tried to pull Betty's teeth out, but she
explained that some humans lose their teeth. This led to
a very confusing exchange between Betty and the leader, again
from Betty's hypnosis session on March four, and the leader says,
does this happen to many people? And he was very arm,
(18:53):
He acted as if he didn't believe me. And I said, well, yes,
it happened almost everyone as they get older. And he said,
well what's older? And I said old age? So he
said what's old age? And I said, well, it varies,
(19:17):
but as a person gets older, there are changes in him,
particularly physically. He sort of begins to break down with
old age, and so he said, well, what is age?
It was very apparent that I was using words that
although he spoke English, his knowledge or the meanings or
(19:40):
most of our words were foreign to him. And I
just couldn't seem to find the right words to make
him understand. So then he said diet. What's diet? So
I'm saying, well, that's the foods wet and so I'm
trying to tell him about the foods. And I said
vegetables and he says, what's vegetables? Well, I was tell
explaining we have many of them. Uh, I'll tell you
(20:04):
about squash. So I said, squash is yellow, and he says,
what's yellow? Yeah, so I look all around it. There's
nothing yellow. So we didn't get along too well, and
I wasn't able to explain in words that he would
understand what I was saying. Betty eventually suggested that maybe
(20:26):
she could set up a meeting with people who would
be better able to answer his questions, but the leader
didn't seem to have the authority to make that kind
of decision. After her physical exam was completed, Betty had
apparently grown comfortable enough to initiate a conversation with the leader.
This has Betty talking with Dennis McCarthy, who was the
interviewer for w I C. H in nine. All Right,
(20:50):
the leader on someone suggests that we should call him
the interpret because he was the only one who spoke English,
and he did speak with an accent. So do they
uh right? English England English type accent? The others did
not speak English, but they had their own language in
(21:10):
which they communicated with each other. Did you get a
chance to ask them where they came from or where
they were here? Yes, I asked, That was the one
question I asked. I asfinitely had two questions. Give me
a su banana, take back, prove this had happened, which
he gave me a book and then laid a ticket
back on the basis that we were not going to
need this. It was like a large, very thin, hard
(21:33):
what she called a book, but is more like what
we think of as a tablet today. There were symbols
embedded in this. There were I believe it was five
rows of symbols. We'll get back to these symbols later
in the episode. Barney's examination, meanwhile, had ended from Betty's
(21:55):
have no Secession on March fourteenth. Then Bonnie's coming. They're
bringing Bonnie out. I hit the men out in the
tarada and I said, bart he's coming. He said, yes,
you can go back to car now, and I get
(22:18):
the book. He's coming out, and Bonny's eyes are still shut.
Good heavens, he's just a fot. I don't wonder if
she made to keep his eye shoulder, if he's skated. Yea.
So now it's trying to go back to the camera
(22:39):
and the lead A six months. We'll walk back to
the car with you. Barney again, isn't engaging with their abductors.
I did not carry on a conversation with these breakers,
and at best that I could describe, I was treated
very indifferent. The best that I can say is my
(23:00):
like it if we found wild beam in the wood, UH,
and we decided to capture it with the intentions of
not harming it, but just to look at it and
observe it and see what it's like and then release it.
There was completely indifference to UH. To UH me as
an intellectual equal to them. I'm all ready to go
(23:23):
down the ramp when some of the other men, not
not the leader, but some of the other men are talking.
I don't know what they say. They're very excited, and
(23:45):
the leader is saying he's saying something. They're they're quite there.
There's that they don't They're undecided. It's about I'm sorry,
And then Oh Jolina comes over and takes my book
(24:18):
and I said, no, I'm furious. I said, you promised
me I could have the book. You gave me a
word I couldn't have it, and he said, I know it.
He said, but the others objecked they don't want you
to have it. And I said that this is my proof.
(24:40):
If you take the book away from me, I'll have
no proof that this has happened. And he said, that's
the whole point. They don't want you to know it's happened.
They want you to be get all about it. And
that's why I'm taking the foot h The idea that
(25:02):
you might not remember this experience worried Betty. She became
concerned that she wouldn't encounter these aliens again from presentation.
And I said, I need to know if you're going
to come back, because I need to know where to
meet you. And he said, if we decided to come back,
we'll let you know. And I said, well, I don't
(25:24):
live around here. He said, we'll find you. So then
he's walking back to the car and with me, and
he said, well, I'm going to leave you here, but
now go down by your car and stay by your
car and watch us leave. If you stay that distance away,
(25:45):
you'll be safe. You won't be in gentlemanly way. So
I went back to the cab and I picked up
my dog, powering on the front seat band he get out.
I leaned against the sender of the car and I
saw this crack. They come surrounded by the swirling, fiery
orange mask that was going around and around and around,
(26:09):
and it lifted up. When up, ye down and when
up again, it was gone. And I'm saying to dog,
you know you maybe he only dig in the world
to see. Under hypnosis, Betty would say that she was
(26:30):
really delighted about the whole thing and was determined not
to forget the experience. Barney was less enthusiastic. Betty and
Barney believed that this abduction experience happened between the two
times that they heard the buzzing noise from the rear
of their car while driving south away from Indian Head
tourist area. If they are right about this, the next
(26:52):
thing that happened was that they gained real consciousness on
Route three near Ashelyn, New Hampshire, about thirty miles south
of Indian Head. From there they would drive to Conquered
to look for coffee and then continue their journey to Portsmouth.
This then gave her framework to explain the missing time.
(27:25):
Under hypnosis, Betty remembered being shown two objects on the spaceship.
One of these objects the leader had given her and
then taken back a book with alien symbols. I have
no idea what the contents were. I had a good
look at the outside of the book and a few
of the pages. It was not an ordinary book like
(27:46):
we have. I don't know what the substance was it
was made out of, but the pages were extremely thinned
and very very smooth, almost like they were coated with
a plastic. The symbols wife up and down rather than across,
and it was a very simplified script, nothing I've ever
(28:06):
seen before. In two thousand one, Kathleen Martin asked her
aunt to recreate what she had seen in the book.
I asked Betty to sketch the symbols that she remembered
observing on the craft. It took her a couple of
weeks for her memory to return, but she did sketch them.
(28:31):
These symbols were then seen by Dr Don Dondrree, a
retired associate professor at McGill University who has done research
on alien abductions. We'll hear from Dr Dondree later in
this series. He had the idea to compare Betty's symbols
two symbols recalled by other supposed abductees. These other symbols
(28:52):
had been compiled for a study undertaken by Dr Dondree
along with artists and UFO researcher Bud Hopkins and Sunni
Brockport professor Stewart Appell. This study attempted to determine if
the symbols recalled by these possible abductees were true memories
of what they'd seen on alien spacecraft or just products
(29:14):
of their imagination over time. Hopkins had asked purported abductees
to draw the symbols they had remembered seeing during their
abduction experience. He had collected drawings from two dozen people,
but how could they determine if they were quote unquote
real and not imagined. Don Dondree wrote about this study
(29:35):
in his book UFOs, E t S and Alien Abductions.
This section is read by an actor. Appel hypnotized twenty
four non abducted control subjects and asked them under hypnosis
to imagine being taken aboard a UFO. When they regained
(29:56):
normal consciousness after the hypnosis, Appell asked them to draw
any symbols they remembered seeing inside the craft during their
hypnotically suggested abduction. If the symbols by Hopkins abductees matched
the symbols remembered by Appel's hypnotized imaginary abductees, that would
(30:18):
suggest the whole alien abduction experience was also imaginary. Each
symbol from both groups was put on a card. Nothing
on the cards identified the source of each symbol. The
cards were mixed together, and a group of undergraduate students
then evaluated the symbols based on criteria they were given.
(30:40):
Despite not knowing the origins of the individual cards, they
scored the abductees symbols differently than the faker symbols. In
other words, in going through the evaluation process they could
tell the difference. This seemed to suggest that the abductees
might have actually seen alien symbols. Still, Donduree stresses that
(31:01):
this symbol evidence is consistent with, but not sufficient proof
of the conclusion that the abduction experiences were real. As
for the symbols that Betty drew, Dr Dondry saw the symbols,
you read the book and he compared those symbols to
(31:22):
the symbols that he and Dr Repel had used in
the academic study. And what they discovered was that Betty's
symbols were very very much like the symbols of the
abductees that Bud Hopkins had been working with dating back
(31:43):
to the mid nineties seventies. So this was an important
piece of information some verification. I've looked at the symbols myself,
and to my eye, they seem like the kinds of
things anyone might make up for a basic cipher, geometric shapes, lines, dots,
and so on. Nothing is complicated as Egyptian hieroglyphics, for instance.
(32:09):
To make things even less clear, the abductive symbols that
I saw from the study done by Dondaree, Hopkins and
appel didn't seem to look very much like each other.
Betty's symbols looked a bit like some and not at
all like others. This so called evidence seems to be
inconclusive at best. In fact, the alien symbols seemed like
(32:31):
almost an afterthought when you talk to people about the
Hill case. The other object that Betty remembered, though, is
definitely not an afterthought. The star map received plenty of
attention and launched a furious debate next time on Strange Arrivals.
(32:56):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written
and hosted by Toby Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins
and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
and Aaron Mankey. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickike.
Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to
(33:19):
the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at the University of
New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C. H ten 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 mile
dot com. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the
(33:41):
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Oh. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio
(00:05):
and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. We go deeper
and deeper, deeper, sleep for our asleep, deeper and deeper,
(00:26):
fully relaxed, almost as a relaxed, comfortable, relaxed. You will
not be anxious. You are discussed. If you will remember
everything and you will tell me everything. Yes, I think
(00:49):
I will stop, I will stop, all right. The story
that Betty and Barney told under hypnosis was extraordinary, a
tale of alien encounter unlike anything before it, an account
so detailed that the story itself seemed to offer possible
(01:12):
proof that it was more than a delusion. It began
with Barney turning off the highway and onto a rural road.
I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals, Episode three,
(01:42):
What's Yellow. Though the Hill's abduction experience was the first
to become widely known, their supposed case wasn't the first
of its kind. About four years before the couple's experience,
another possible abduction had taken place on a farm in
(02:03):
the Meanest Jerai's region of Brazil. History professor and host
of the sacer Life podcast, Aaron Gullias Antonio villis Bois
in South America. Seven is out in the field and
encounters a a UFO and he's taken aboard it. But
it's not sort of a typical nineteen fifties contact. The experience.
(02:27):
There are strange looking people on the craft and they're
they're human ish, but they're not human um and there's
there's one figure in particular, a he identifies the figures
female with with red hair and a pale body. And
he's taken into a room and medical tests are performed
(02:49):
on him, and he's strapped down and he's naked, and
then he has a sexual encounter with this woman. And
the impression we get from the tale that's told to
a researcher who then tells it to people from the
American Organization a PRO who were the first to sort
of publish an English language sort of report of this
in the late nineteen fifties is that they were extracting seamen,
(03:11):
probably for whatever experimental purpose they had. After the encounter,
hillis BoA's is disoriented, in pain, he's got a headache,
some vision problems, vertigo, all kinds of stuff going on,
and he tells his story and he finds a researcher
and tells him the story. And no matter how many
times he tells his story, it remains remarkably consistent. It's
(03:35):
not from hypnosis, it's from his conscious memory of what
went on. And he's just a regular guy. He's working.
He will eventually go to law school and become a lawyer.
I believe he's got nothing to gain really by telling
this outlandish and frankly embarrassing story. And there's some strange
(03:56):
details in it that are just really interesting. The woman
will call them a woman being on the saucer that
has the sexual encounter with him. She screams like an animal,
so that this this inhuman animalistic noise emanates from her
and greatly disturbs him, and he sort of aroused, sort
of despite himself, and is literally forced into this act.
(04:19):
And it's troubling and it's awkward and it's strange, and
like I said, there's nothing, there's no upside to sharing
this with people, but he does share it. Villis Bois
essentially claimed he was sexually assaulted by a feral spacewoman.
He would say that before they left, this woman rubbed
(04:40):
her belly and pointed up towards the stars. He understood
this to mean that she was taking what would be
their baby back to where she'd come from. Villis Bois
story made it to the US before Betty and Barney
Hill's experience, but it seems very unlikely that either Betty
or Barney would have known of it. Aaron mentioned APRO
(05:00):
for and does again here it's an acritive for the
Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization, a UFO research group at the time.
APRO published the story in their newsletter in the late
nineteen fifties, and I think their book, Flying Saucer Occupants
came out in the late fifties or early sixties, and
it's in this book, Flying Saucer Occupants, which was published
(05:22):
in a you know, pocketbook paperback format that was on
all the news stands. That's where most people read about
the story. So as far as the case being well known,
it would have been well known to people who read
UFO books. It would not have been well known to
the general public or people driving down the road in
New Hampshire in the mid sixties. I wouldn't think for
(05:45):
Betty and Barney, though their UFO sighting was different. It
started with a light in the sky, and reached a
climax when they encountered a spaceship near Indian Head. That
story ended when they arrived home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
at least two hours later than they had expected. They
had continuous memory of these events, That is, there was
(06:07):
no perceivable gap between the events and Betty and Barney's
ability to recall them. In the days following the encounter,
Betty had unusually vivid dreams about being aboard a spaceship,
but neither she nor Barney actually remembered anything. The memory
of these events only emerged two years later. During the
(06:30):
first half of nine four, the Hills made the hour
long drive to the Boston office of Dr Benjamin Simon.
During separate hypnosis sessions with Dr Simon, Betty and Barney
told very similar stories about being brought aboard in alien spacecraft.
So what exactly happened to Barney and Betty Hill during
(06:50):
those two missing hours? After Betty and Barney turned off
into the woods, they found themselves in a sort of trance.
They remember being escorted through the woods to where the
UFO waited. Betty said Barney was totally out of it
and provided no resistance. Betty struggled but was no match
(07:13):
for the beings. They were brought up a ramp and
into the ship. Barney from a May nine six radio interview.
I was carried bare with one door into another door,
and there was this room with pie shape, but as
I described it much like a pie with the point
(07:34):
of the pie. And it was just one table that
was very small for my body. I'm about my for
the eight where I like, I got onto the table myself,
and I am continually hearing this voice that is telling
me that no harm is going to come to me.
(07:55):
Is on the amount of you uh tists that are
going to think of solfs to some calm about with
no damaging stuff. The next several clips feature Betty, recorded
decades later in the nineties and nineties. So I went
(08:17):
on board the craft and I went into an unlighted carrada,
and then I was taken into the first room. But
and he was taken into the second room. And at
this point the purposes of identification, I now call him
the leader, but under hypnosis I always refer to him
(08:37):
as the one who speaks English. And so he was
in the room and then they examined it came in
and there were nine others who stayed in the carrada.
I haven't taken into this first room, and it was
like there. It was at small table, it was a stool,
(08:58):
and then the wall the dough they were does in
the wall that would slide back and full. And they
put me on a still, checked my eyes, is nose, throat,
my feet, my hands, and they later would look at
my skin and then they examined. They could two turns
(09:18):
looking at my skin, and they were all the time
they're carrying on this conversation very excited, like in their
own language, which I had never heard before. Then they
said put me on the table and said they wanted
to check my nervous system and they use some special
kind of equipment to do this. UFO researcher and Betty
(09:42):
Hill's niece Kathleen Martin, they were very interested in every
opening in her body, into looking at everything. They were
especially interested in her teeth, their joints. They removed their shoes,
they moved their joints, their fingers, their toes, their arms,
(10:04):
their legs, and then they appeared to have done neurological
testing on Betty and Barney as well. Betty stated that
they had placed a stylish kind of thing on her back.
Betty continues the story from the transcript of her March
four hypnosis session, as read by an actress. So I'm
(10:30):
sitting on the stool and there's this little bracket and
my head is resting against the bracket, and the examina
opened my eyes and he looks in them with a light,
and he opens my mouth and he looks at my
throat and my teeth, and he looks in my ears.
(10:50):
And then he turned my head and he looks in
this here, and then he takes out like a swab
or a q tip. I guess it is like like
they was on abies, and he cleaned out and he
puts it in my left ear, and then he puts
this on another piece of material, and the leader takes
it and he rolls it up and he puts it
(11:11):
in the top drawer too. Then then he feels my
hair and then the back of my neck, and then
they take a couple of strands of my hair and
they pull it out and he gives us to the
leader and he wraps that all up and he puts
that in the top drawer. And then he takes something
that maybe like scissors. I don't know what it is.
(11:35):
And they caught a piece of my hair. Here he
starts feeling behind my years and under my chin, and
down my neck and throw my shoulders around my collar
phone and then they take off my shoes and they
look at my feet, and they look at my hands.
(11:55):
Daddy was taken to this table where they moved her dress.
They did not know how to undo a zipper, and
so they ended up tearing the top of Betty's dress.
And then she showed them how to unzip that zipper.
The dress fell into a pile on the floor and
(12:16):
her slip was pulled up. And then the final test
was they tried to insert a needle like instrument in
my navel. We say some of the pregnancy test that
it caused a great deal of pain, so they stopped
doing this. And this was and at that time we
didn't have any kind of testing like this. It was
(12:39):
like that we developed him. She's talking about amniocentesis, a
test used with pregnant women that can determine the gender
of a fetus, as well as any possible infections or
chromosomal abnormalities. It was under development in but wasn't presented
to the public until Betty, of course, was not pregnant.
(13:06):
It caused so much pain to Betty that she screamed
in agony, and she writhed the leader removed her pain
by doing something up around her head. And generally, the
one that she called the leader that we now call
the escort, who is with experiencers time and time again
(13:30):
when they are taken, is the one who does most
of the communication, is the one who establishes a relationship
with that human subject, and also who removes any pain
or any anxiety or fear that the subject is experiencing.
Dr Simon had to end that session early due to
(13:54):
the degree of trauma that Betty was experiencing. In the
next session that he came to, the physician had left
the room. He had gone to do Barney's examination. Betty
didn't know that at the time, but that's what was
taking place in the next room. Over strange arrivals will
(14:18):
return in a moment. Betty recounted being given a kind
(14:39):
of physical examination, including a painful procedure involving a needle
being inserted in her navel. When the exam was completed,
the being that she called the physician left the room,
though she didn't know it at the time. He'd gone
to see Barney from the radio a new view. I
(15:02):
offered no resistance, No, I love me concerned about Betty's
well aware about I feel a little guilty as a
husbital to not be concerned about my life. But this
is such a terrifying situation that I was already concerned
about myself and I was being assured that I wasn't
going to be hard. So that I was faced on
(15:23):
this table where my jobs were removed, and my shirt
was pulled up with my head which would have made
my back. My under shirt was sold up along with
it where my back would have been there, and I
was turned over on my back and my stomach as
well as uh well, I could feel what I called
(15:46):
a being going up and down the final column. With
this examination, uh, I remembered a plug at my teeth,
and this is the way I described. And also while
in this position of being damned, I opened my eyes
again compleadingly, because I could hear a kind of noise
(16:09):
as if people or someone was talking. I opened my
eyes and I looked, and I saw these three short maths.
And this is when I got a good look at
the face. I immediately closed my eyes because what I
saw was terrifying by standard, it doesn't mean that they
were terrifying. Well, how would you describe yourself? I saw
(16:30):
this kind of grayish color, and wasn't I think, because
most people they're not When saw the little green men,
and they were not green, then they were a grayish,
metallic kind of gray in color. And I might also
say that I'm quite sure they were not wearing a
mask or rather any kind of apparatus over the head
for breathing purposes, because I could see what would have
(16:53):
been about a thin line without a lip muffle, that
when potty went open, there was a membrane inside that
fluttered really right at the end of the month itself,
and it fluttered. And this seems to be a way
that they communicated with one another with a very peculiar
kind of properly. This is from the transcript of Barney's
(17:19):
February twenty ninth session, as read by an actor. I
was buying on a table and my flyer was open,
and I thought, are they putting the cup around my
private parts? And then stopped and I thought, how funny.
(17:44):
I thought, how funny if I keep real quiet and
real still. I won't be harmed, and it will be over,
and I will just stay here and pretend that I
am anywhere, and think of God and think of Jesus,
and think I am not afraid. They also examined Barney's
(18:06):
mouth and found something that surprised them. They rushed to
Betty's room to get more information. They came running into
the room, some of them, and they had dentures in
their hands. Well, I guess. When they checked Barney's mouth,
they noticed that his teeth were removable, but Betty's were not.
So they were very curious about what was going on,
(18:28):
and they tried to pull Betty's teeth out, but she
explained that some humans lose their teeth. This led to
a very confusing exchange between Betty and the leader, again
from Betty's hypnosis session on March four, and the leader says,
does this happen to many people? And he was very arm,
(18:53):
He acted as if he didn't believe me. And I said, well, yes,
it happened almost everyone as they get older. And he said,
well what's older? And I said old age? So he
said what's old age? And I said, well, it varies,
(19:17):
but as a person gets older, there are changes in him,
particularly physically. He sort of begins to break down with
old age, and so he said, well, what is age?
It was very apparent that I was using words that
although he spoke English, his knowledge or the meanings or
(19:40):
most of our words were foreign to him. And I
just couldn't seem to find the right words to make
him understand. So then he said diet. What's diet? So
I'm saying, well, that's the foods wet and so I'm
trying to tell him about the foods. And I said
vegetables and he says, what's vegetables? Well, I was tell
explaining we have many of them. Uh, I'll tell you
(20:04):
about squash. So I said, squash is yellow, and he says,
what's yellow? Yeah, so I look all around it. There's
nothing yellow. So we didn't get along too well, and
I wasn't able to explain in words that he would
understand what I was saying. Betty eventually suggested that maybe
(20:26):
she could set up a meeting with people who would
be better able to answer his questions, but the leader
didn't seem to have the authority to make that kind
of decision. After her physical exam was completed, Betty had
apparently grown comfortable enough to initiate a conversation with the leader.
This has Betty talking with Dennis McCarthy, who was the
interviewer for w I C. H in nine. All Right,
(20:50):
the leader on someone suggests that we should call him
the interpret because he was the only one who spoke English,
and he did speak with an accent. So do they
uh right? English England English type accent? The others did
not speak English, but they had their own language in
(21:10):
which they communicated with each other. Did you get a
chance to ask them where they came from or where
they were here? Yes, I asked, That was the one
question I asked. I asfinitely had two questions. Give me
a su banana, take back, prove this had happened, which
he gave me a book and then laid a ticket
back on the basis that we were not going to
need this. It was like a large, very thin, hard
(21:33):
what she called a book, but is more like what
we think of as a tablet today. There were symbols
embedded in this. There were I believe it was five
rows of symbols. We'll get back to these symbols later
in the episode. Barney's examination, meanwhile, had ended from Betty's
(21:55):
have no Secession on March fourteenth. Then Bonnie's coming. They're
bringing Bonnie out. I hit the men out in the
tarada and I said, bart he's coming. He said, yes,
you can go back to car now, and I get
(22:18):
the book. He's coming out, and Bonny's eyes are still shut.
Good heavens, he's just a fot. I don't wonder if
she made to keep his eye shoulder, if he's skated. Yea.
So now it's trying to go back to the camera
(22:39):
and the lead A six months. We'll walk back to
the car with you. Barney again, isn't engaging with their abductors.
I did not carry on a conversation with these breakers,
and at best that I could describe, I was treated
very indifferent. The best that I can say is my
(23:00):
like it if we found wild beam in the wood, UH,
and we decided to capture it with the intentions of
not harming it, but just to look at it and
observe it and see what it's like and then release it.
There was completely indifference to UH. To UH me as
an intellectual equal to them. I'm all ready to go
(23:23):
down the ramp when some of the other men, not
not the leader, but some of the other men are talking.
I don't know what they say. They're very excited, and
(23:45):
the leader is saying he's saying something. They're they're quite there.
There's that they don't They're undecided. It's about I'm sorry,
And then Oh Jolina comes over and takes my book
(24:18):
and I said, no, I'm furious. I said, you promised
me I could have the book. You gave me a
word I couldn't have it, and he said, I know it.
He said, but the others objecked they don't want you
to have it. And I said that this is my proof.
(24:40):
If you take the book away from me, I'll have
no proof that this has happened. And he said, that's
the whole point. They don't want you to know it's happened.
They want you to be get all about it. And
that's why I'm taking the foot h The idea that
(25:02):
you might not remember this experience worried Betty. She became
concerned that she wouldn't encounter these aliens again from presentation.
And I said, I need to know if you're going
to come back, because I need to know where to
meet you. And he said, if we decided to come back,
we'll let you know. And I said, well, I don't
(25:24):
live around here. He said, we'll find you. So then
he's walking back to the car and with me, and
he said, well, I'm going to leave you here, but
now go down by your car and stay by your
car and watch us leave. If you stay that distance away,
(25:45):
you'll be safe. You won't be in gentlemanly way. So
I went back to the cab and I picked up
my dog, powering on the front seat band he get out.
I leaned against the sender of the car and I
saw this crack. They come surrounded by the swirling, fiery
orange mask that was going around and around and around,
(26:09):
and it lifted up. When up, ye down and when
up again, it was gone. And I'm saying to dog,
you know you maybe he only dig in the world
to see. Under hypnosis, Betty would say that she was
(26:30):
really delighted about the whole thing and was determined not
to forget the experience. Barney was less enthusiastic. Betty and
Barney believed that this abduction experience happened between the two
times that they heard the buzzing noise from the rear
of their car while driving south away from Indian Head
tourist area. If they are right about this, the next
(26:52):
thing that happened was that they gained real consciousness on
Route three near Ashelyn, New Hampshire, about thirty miles south
of Indian Head. From there they would drive to Conquered
to look for coffee and then continue their journey to Portsmouth.
This then gave her framework to explain the missing time.
(27:25):
Under hypnosis, Betty remembered being shown two objects on the spaceship.
One of these objects the leader had given her and
then taken back a book with alien symbols. I have
no idea what the contents were. I had a good
look at the outside of the book and a few
of the pages. It was not an ordinary book like
(27:46):
we have. I don't know what the substance was it
was made out of, but the pages were extremely thinned
and very very smooth, almost like they were coated with
a plastic. The symbols wife up and down rather than across,
and it was a very simplified script, nothing I've ever
(28:06):
seen before. In two thousand one, Kathleen Martin asked her
aunt to recreate what she had seen in the book.
I asked Betty to sketch the symbols that she remembered
observing on the craft. It took her a couple of
weeks for her memory to return, but she did sketch them.
(28:31):
These symbols were then seen by Dr Don Dondrree, a
retired associate professor at McGill University who has done research
on alien abductions. We'll hear from Dr Dondree later in
this series. He had the idea to compare Betty's symbols
two symbols recalled by other supposed abductees. These other symbols
(28:52):
had been compiled for a study undertaken by Dr Dondree
along with artists and UFO researcher Bud Hopkins and Sunni
Brockport professor Stewart Appell. This study attempted to determine if
the symbols recalled by these possible abductees were true memories
of what they'd seen on alien spacecraft or just products
(29:14):
of their imagination over time. Hopkins had asked purported abductees
to draw the symbols they had remembered seeing during their
abduction experience. He had collected drawings from two dozen people,
but how could they determine if they were quote unquote
real and not imagined. Don Dondree wrote about this study
(29:35):
in his book UFOs, E t S and Alien Abductions.
This section is read by an actor. Appel hypnotized twenty
four non abducted control subjects and asked them under hypnosis
to imagine being taken aboard a UFO. When they regained
(29:56):
normal consciousness after the hypnosis, Appell asked them to draw
any symbols they remembered seeing inside the craft during their
hypnotically suggested abduction. If the symbols by Hopkins abductees matched
the symbols remembered by Appel's hypnotized imaginary abductees, that would
(30:18):
suggest the whole alien abduction experience was also imaginary. Each
symbol from both groups was put on a card. Nothing
on the cards identified the source of each symbol. The
cards were mixed together, and a group of undergraduate students
then evaluated the symbols based on criteria they were given.
(30:40):
Despite not knowing the origins of the individual cards, they
scored the abductees symbols differently than the faker symbols. In
other words, in going through the evaluation process they could
tell the difference. This seemed to suggest that the abductees
might have actually seen alien symbols. Still, Donduree stresses that
(31:01):
this symbol evidence is consistent with, but not sufficient proof
of the conclusion that the abduction experiences were real. As
for the symbols that Betty drew, Dr Dondry saw the symbols,
you read the book and he compared those symbols to
(31:22):
the symbols that he and Dr Repel had used in
the academic study. And what they discovered was that Betty's
symbols were very very much like the symbols of the
abductees that Bud Hopkins had been working with dating back
(31:43):
to the mid nineties seventies. So this was an important
piece of information some verification. I've looked at the symbols myself,
and to my eye, they seem like the kinds of
things anyone might make up for a basic cipher, geometric shapes, lines, dots,
and so on. Nothing is complicated as Egyptian hieroglyphics, for instance.
(32:09):
To make things even less clear, the abductive symbols that
I saw from the study done by Dondaree, Hopkins and
appel didn't seem to look very much like each other.
Betty's symbols looked a bit like some and not at
all like others. This so called evidence seems to be
inconclusive at best. In fact, the alien symbols seemed like
(32:31):
almost an afterthought when you talk to people about the
Hill case. The other object that Betty remembered, though, is
definitely not an afterthought. The star map received plenty of
attention and launched a furious debate next time on Strange Arrivals.
(32:56):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written
and hosted by Toby Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins
and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
and Aaron Mankey. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickike.
Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to
(33:19):
the Miln's Special Collections and Archives at the University of
New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y C. H ten 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 mile
dot com. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the
(33:41):
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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