Zeta Reticuli

While under hypnosis, Betty Hill told of being shown a star map by one of her alien captors. Years later, she sketched what she remembered of the map. This led a teacher named Marjorie Fish to create intricate models of the galaxy to determine the origin of the space craft, and set off a dispute about the accuracy of the map and the reality of their experience.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. In this episode, you
will hear from Stanton Friedman, a leading researcher on the
Hill Encounter. A few months after I interviewed him, he
passed away at the age of eighty four. I had

(00:25):
a thoroughly enjoyable forty five minute conversation with him, during
which he answered all my questions at length and gave
me a good natured hard time about my skepticism. I
know his passing is a loss to the UFO community,
and I feel fortunate to have had the chance to
chat with him. October Margine. My qualification to do this research,

(01:01):
I've had one course of an astronomy in college about
twenty years ago, which doesn't amount too much except it
did show me to their placement and quite an interest
in that since childhood. But my main interest is in
biology and anthropology. My degree was in sociology. I went
back from my teaching credits later. I also had what

(01:24):
amounted to the pre med course with a great interest
in biology. Being passion is anthropology makes um euphorology so interesting,
and you can consider how many different kinds of cultures
there might be, and add to this a different biological
background which would lead into even more complex and far

(01:48):
reaching cultural differences. Aspects are highly intriguing, to say the least.
Betty Hill recalled being shown two objects while she was
on the spacecraft. The first was a type of book
containing alien symbols. We looked at this in the previous episode.

(02:08):
The second object was more compelling and it prompted exhaustive research.
Proponents of the Hill story point to it is evidence
that they were in fact abducted by aliens. This object
came to be called the star map. I'm tolbee ball.

(02:30):
This is Strange Arrivals Episode four, Zeta Reticuli. Betty and

(02:52):
Barney Hill reacted very differently during their abduction experience. Barney
spent much of the time in a day's responsive to
Betty's please. His hypnotic recall suggested that he regarded the
experience as something to be endured, and he kept his
eyes firmly shut from much of the ordeal. Betty, on

(03:14):
the other hand, told of being energized and engaged. In particular,
she carried on a conversation with one of the aliens,
whom she called the leader. She says, she asked the
leader to things. One was for a souvenir. The leader
gave her the book with the alien symbols and then,

(03:35):
to her frustration, took it back again. The second thing
she asked was where are you from. Here's Betty from
her hypnosis session on March fourteenth land across the room.

(04:00):
Did the head of the table, and there was he
did something. It wasn't like a draw, he said, I
did something in the metal of the wall. There was
an opening and he pulled down a map. Man He

(04:27):
asked me, had I ever seen a map like this before?
And I watched across the room and I leaned against
the table and I looked at it. It was an
oblong nap and he said that the heavy lines were

(04:56):
trade routes, and then the other lines the other that
the solid lines were place as they went Occasionally, he

(05:19):
said that it's a broken lines were expeditions. Betty asked
the leader to point out where he was from. He
responded by asking if she knew where the Earth would
be on the map. Betty said that she didn't. The

(05:41):
leader said that if that was the case, showing her
his home star on the map, wouldn't mean anything to her,
and he put it away. And this at first was
the whole story of the star map, as we're called
under hypnosis by Betty. Barney was not in the room
at the time and did not mention it. Dr Benjamin Simon,

(06:02):
the psychiatrist who conducted the hypnosis sessions with the Hills,
seems to have been intrigued by mention of the star
map Betty Hill from presentation. Dr Simon gave me a
post autumatic suggestion. He said, if I wanted to, I
could sketch the start map, but if I didn't want it,

(06:23):
I didn't have to. So about two weeks later I
sketched it. You can easily find images of her sketch
on the Internet. It was drawn on a single piece
of paper. Twenty one circles and dots representing stars are
spread across the page, some connected with lines and others
just by themselves. I wouldn't call the resulting map crude exactly.

(06:46):
Maybe casual is a better word. Think about what you
would draw if someone asked you for a map showing
how to get from the nearest highway to your house.
You'd probably get all the roads and turns right but
with the length of the roads be perfectly to scale.
Betty's star map seems like a galactic equivalent of that
kind of map, but that's not how everyone perceived it.

(07:08):
A school teacher from Ohio named Marjorie Fish saw the
star map and thought it might reveal where the aliens
came from. She decided to try to figure out the
vantage point in our galaxy from which the map was made.
Working in the nineties, sixties and seventies, Marjorie didn't have
access to a computer to pursue her research. Her efforts

(07:28):
were decidedly analog, and they were extraordinary. In her living room,
she created a series of three dimensional models of the
nearby galaxy using beads hung from the ceiling by string.
Here's Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and uphologist. He was
a leading researcher into the Hills story for fifty years

(07:51):
and knew both Betty and Barney and an A brilliant
woman named Marjorie Fish did something nobody else had ever done.
She about three dimensional models of our local galactic neighborhood.
Incredibly detailed work. I mean, her biggest model had two
hundred and fifty six stars in it. That means you've

(08:12):
got to have the location of the star before you
can build them model little beats hung on strings. That
is tedious work and now hard part at that time,
because it's hard to measure distances. It's easy to measure angles.
You know, we're in this sky to look. That's a
two dimensional problem. But how far away is it? Ah,

(08:33):
we had lousy data. She got the best data available.
She wound up building a total of more than twenty
three dimensional models and was able to find one and
only one pattern that matched what Betty had drawn. Angle
for angle, line length for line length. The Milne Special

(08:59):
Collections and Archive at the University of New Hampshire's Diamond
Library as a number of photographs of Marjorie Fish's models.
She either used cloth or paper to create a black background.
A huge number of beads are suspended in air by
strings attached to the ceiling. They look like super thin icicles.

(09:21):
Marjorie would examine the model from different spots and angles,
trying to find one that match Betty's star map. It
was exacting work. To get a sense of how detailed
her efforts were, we can listen to a recording she
made in late nineteen nine. During her work on her models,

(09:42):
she engaged in a correspondence with a scientist named Richard Lee.
In response to letters that he apparently wrote her with
questions about her methods. She sent audio tapes. Most of
the conversation is technical and sounds like this. Right now,
I'm in the process of going through the metric parallax

(10:05):
catalog and pulling out all these stars in the parallax
of point zero four nine two point zero three. Oh,
this would take all the stars from sixty five light
years out to a hundred light years to supplement the
fleecy catalog so that a model can be constructed of
these stars. Now, this is one of my listing of

(10:29):
stars of good have plants with life, so I'm not
going to be including the stars brighter than F five.
And the work was frustrating too, because she was unable
to find a match in her model for Betty's map.
But then a scientific discovery suddenly unlocked the maps puzzle
and in the process seemed to suggest that it might

(10:51):
truly have an extraterrestrial origin. Strange arrivals will return in
a moment. Marjorie Fish went to incredible lengths building complex

(11:19):
models to try to identify the vantage point of the
star map. Her efforts went unrewarded until new astronomical data
became available and she updated her model. Kathleen Martin, Betty's niece,
and a UFO researcher. This one was after three additional

(11:40):
stars were discovered by astronomers and she added them to
the map, and she changed the distance data on some
of the others, and then in two she had a match.
To be clear, what Kathleen is saying is that Marjorie
Fish was able to find a model that fit the

(12:01):
star map until three previously undiscovered stars were identified. Once
she added them to her model, she had a match.
The inference here is that there is only one way
Betty could have drawn the map with those stars. That is,
if the map that she saw that night had information

(12:21):
not known to scientists at the time. Could this be
proof that the map was not of earthly origin. The
next step was to have her work vetted for accuracy
and to be verified by the scientific community. Here's Marjorie
again from her audio correspondence. I had assumed that everyone
in the field wanted to know where they came from.

(12:43):
I put in cross references and extra datus, so it
could be a pot chect in the matter of an
hour or two and thoroughly check in our two days.
Point by point the model could be built and checked
inside of a week. Everything I've done can be checked.
Since I've worked out all the methods, these could be
out and redone for are easier in the first time

(13:03):
of attack had to be lopped out. This is when
Stanton Friedman was called in as a nuclear physicist, and
this was his interest in the case. He was able
to find astrophysicists to vet Marjorie's work. It also ended
up being done as a computer generated analysis at Ohio

(13:28):
State University, and what they discovered is that the two
primary stars in the foreground were as they to reticulate,
one and two that are about thirty nine and a
half light years away, because one further away than the other,

(13:48):
but they were only about a light year apart, which
was fairly close. There were binary stars, but they could
possibly maintain a stable war but so theoretically planets would
be able to evolve around those stars, just like we
have with our son in our solar system. Now that

(14:16):
the stars had apparently been identified, more research could be
done on the map. Betty thought that she might be
able to use it to identify a purpose for the
alien journeys. What we know about the universe is still
all in a theory. We still don't know. You know
a lot of the speculation, but the speculation is that

(14:39):
there are party seven nearby stads that our astronomers believe
have a son, and planets and conditions very similar to us.
I could have advanced life now. I had sixteen of
those Friday seven stars on my map out of an
area of about two hundred studs in the sky. Uh
the broken law well willing to staff systems which are

(15:04):
younger than we are. Um, the heavy lines are going
to send systems our age older. So it's looking it
looks as though they're going out into the nearby staff systems,
looking them all, finding out the stage of advancement of life,
and if we're advanced enough, they come back and take
another look. If we're not, if they going to younger

(15:27):
planets and they're not advanced, they go out on an
expedition and then I'll go back others. Stanton Freedman in
particular sought to support the star map with scientific credibility.
As we'll see that effort was met with significant pushback.
I published her work in an article in UFO magazine.

(15:50):
I guess it was something like that. And then I
convinced Terry Dickinson, who was editor of Astronomy magazine. I
had met Jerry had attended one of my lectors, and
I told him about Marjorie's work and suggested he to
an article about it. Well, he talked to a whole
bunch of people. He wasn't gonna accept what I said.

(16:10):
I mean, that was interesting, and and he looked at
what I had published, and then he wrote an article.
He talked to Cross SAG and he talked to a
whole bunch of people. It got more response than anything
they'd ever published. And he carried letters over the next
year and finally put out at thirty two page full

(16:32):
color booklet, The Zeta Reticuli Incident, and sold ten thousand
copies right off the bat, which was incredible. And then
Carl Sagan's attorney complained because Carl's name was on the
cover with five other contributors I think it was five
something like then, and threatened to sue him. Terry Dickinson,

(17:00):
the editor of the Fledgling Astronomy Magazine, it had only
been in existence for a year and a half, was
clearly intrigued by the Hill's tail, and found the evidence
on balance to be inconclusive. His article ends with the sentence,
the only answer is to continue the search. Someday, perhaps soon,

(17:20):
we will know. This set off nearly a year's worth
of argument in Astronomy Magazine's letter section. This level of
interest led to the publication of the special edition titled
the Zeta Reticuli Incident. It contained Dickinson's original article and
then a series of letters and responses from scientists and

(17:41):
other experts. Carl Sagan was the host of the phenomenally
popular nine eighties television show Cosmos. He was perhaps the
most famous scientist in America. Marjorie felt that it would
be important to bring the star map to his attention
against the private him as the oddly enough, he's prejudice

(18:02):
against youthos. This may work our favor if he's reasonably fair,
although I've heard he may not be if I can
get him interested enough or mad enough to try to
find flaws in the data, and he can't. He says
so his word as a respected scientist and as an
a opponent to uthos will carry more weight. I found
a two falls in his work, and that just might

(18:23):
get him mad enough to want to find some in mine.
She got Siggin's attention all right. He sent letters to
Astronomy strongly taking issue with the star maps authenticity. When
the special edition was published, he threatened to sue Astronomy
Magazine because he had not given permission for his letters

(18:44):
to be reprinted. The issue was pulled from the shelves.
The entire data reticulous incident seems to be something of
a fondly remembered embarrassment to Astronomy Magazine. In the online
version of the original article, current editor David Ker writes
two things happened from this absurd tale. First, it sold

(19:04):
lots of books. Second, it nearly ruined the reputation of
this young Astronomy magazine. He also says it may have
caused Dickins in his job, as he was fired months later. Sagan, however,
was not finished with his public criticism of the star map.
His show Cosmos mostly focused on explaining space physics to

(19:26):
a general audience, but in episode twelve Encyclopedia Galactica, he
focused on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In this episode,
there's a brief segment about Betty and Barney Hill. He said,
don't believe, Oh I don't. There must be a reasonable explanation.
The episode begins with the bizarre dramatization of the Hills

(19:50):
UFO encounter. Betty and Barney are depicted driving in the
rain and then lurching around in a stupor. It wasn't
raining the night of the Hills encounter. Of course, the
scene seems calculated to make them look as silly as possible.
After this unpromising start, the episode cuts to Carl Sagan,

(20:11):
looking dapper in a tan jacket and blue shirt. He
walks along the side of a grassy hill. He's carrying
a path of some sort that turns out to have
a simplified version of Betty's star map. This seems to
be the real reason for bringing up the Hills. He
goes through a sequence of comparisons between betty star map

(20:32):
and a map of the stars from Marjorie Fish's model.
The first comparison is between the two maps with the
lines indicating trade routes drawn in. Sagan says they look similar,
but mostly because of the lines. He then shows the
Fish map with a different set of lines strawn. Now,
as you'd expect, the maps suddenly look very different. But

(20:56):
he doesn't stop there. The real test, he says, is
to take a look at the maps without any lines
drawn in to connect the stars and compare them that way.
When he shows these two maps, they don't look much
alike at all. Looking at this last pair of maps,
he concludes, as read by a voice actor, and then

(21:19):
there's very little resemblance left. But these particular stars are
selected from a large catalog of star positions. Our vantage
point in space is also selected to make the best
possible fit with the Hill map. If you can pick
and choose from a large number of stars viewed from
any advantage point in space you want, you can always
find something resembling the pattern you're looking for. I'm surprised

(21:43):
that nobody could find a better fit to the Hill map.
Not surprisingly, proponents of the Hill story were not amused.
In response to this episode, Stanton Friedman wrote a furious
letter to the senior vice president of kse CET, the
public broadcasting system station that produced Cosmos. In it, he

(22:07):
strongly objects to the portrayal of the Hill encounter and
the segment on the star map. He says it is
part of a clear attempt to set science up on
one side and believers UFO enthusiasts on the side of
religion and superstition and obviously not scientific. Freedmen clearly objects

(22:29):
to Sagan's tone regarding quote unquote UFO enthusiasts. But the
real question here is whether the map that Betty drew
on a sheet of paper based on her hypnotically regressed
memory provides an accurate tool to identify a distinct group
of stars. I'd be willing about that if you took

(22:50):
a handful of sunflowers so he's dropped them on a
piece of paper and mark their locations, that you would
be able to find someplace in the universe that matched
that pattern at some rain chet some orientation, at some scale.
This is author Jim McDonald. I'd also be willing to
bet that the the Hill map matches somewhere else in

(23:11):
the universe as well, or better that it matches uh
the setter reticulised site. I will also bet that that
same map matches the pattern of some group of towns, cities,
or villages somewhere in the world. At some orientation, at
some range, at some scale, or that it matches the patterns,

(23:34):
and somebody of water islands at some body of water
at some range, at some scale, at some orientation, unless
and until we get to set articular and find little
gray aliens. Uh, it's nothing. It's dots on a piece
of paper, which you or I could make dots on
a piece of paper. But it is not just the

(23:54):
process of matching Betty's map to an actual part of
the galaxy that causes problems. How how accurate could the
map possibly be? Think about how difficult it would be
to precisely place a series of dots and lines on
a piece of paper based on something you've seen two
years ago, Hosts of the Skeptoid podcast, Ryan Dunning. The

(24:16):
claim associated with this map is that she saw this
on a wall in the spaceship and then two and
a half years later, remembered what it looked like, and
during the hypnosis session drew this out, drew these dots
on a piece of paper, and based on that, we're
supposed to believe that this is an absolutely accurate, you know,

(24:37):
to the micron depiction of stars in our local galaxy.
Here somewhere that's an awfully weak point right there. When
you look at a map showing a dozen dots that
are in a random more or less a random distribution,
are you going to be able to reproduce the positions
of each one of those exactly more than two years later?

(24:58):
That strange credib pility right there. There's no reason to
think her memory of that star map would be remotely accurate,
let alone accurate at all. I mean, the brain simply
doesn't work that way. Our brains are not digital recorders.
Our brains are abstraction engines. When you look at a
map that shows a dozen dots, the only thing your

(25:20):
brain stores is that there were a dozen dots randomly
distributed on that paper, and that's the best you can
do when you try to reproduce it later. There's no
reason to think that this map could have been an
accurate representation of something she'd seen two years before. Carl
Sagan and Jim McDonald may have been right that you

(25:41):
can find matches for any random array of stars if
you search enough, But with what we know now, that
seems almost beside the point, Because it is nearly impossible
to believe that Betty could sketch a replica of the
star map with the incredible degree of accuracy needed to
identify Zata Reticuli as the alien's point of origin. This

(26:04):
doesn't prove that Betty wasn't shown a star map by
the leader or aboard a spaceship, merely that the chances
that she could produce an accurate replica are essentially zero.
Late in life, when more accurate data about the characteristics
and locations of stars in our galaxy became available, Marjorie
Fish concluded that her identification of Zeta Reticuli was not accurate.

(26:28):
This view was mentioned in the obituary that ran when
she died on April eight. Quote later, after newer data
was compiled, she determined that the binary stars within the
pattern were too close together to support life, so, as
a true skeptic, she issued a statement that she now

(26:49):
felt that the correlation was unlikely. Even if you concede
that using the star map to locate the alien's point
of origin is a dead end, it doesn't really prove
the the Hill's abduction experience didn't happen. There's still this.
Betty and Barney were hypnotized separately and told similar mutually

(27:09):
supporting stories, stories they hadn't remembered before their hypnosis sessions.
How can you explain this if they hadn't actually been
abducted during those missing hours? Next time on Strange Arrivals.
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and

(27:31):
Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written
and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced by Miranda Hawkins
and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey.
Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to

(27:51):
the MILM Special Collections and Archives at the University of
New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y Am in Norwich, connectic it,
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

(28:11):
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.