The Hill Abduction

The story begins on the night of 19 to 20 September 1961. Betty and Barney Hill were driving home along Route US-3, through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, returning from a holiday in Canada.

At some point Betty notices a bright light, like a star, that seems to keep pace with the car from a great distance. As the light appears to draw closer, she points it out to her husband, who tells her it is probably a satellite. Their dog, Delsey, is in the car too, and by now she is growing restless, so Barney pulls over to let her out for some air. During that stop the Hills get a better look and conclude that the object really is moving. They drive on, stopping again and again to watch the light, which now moves in an erratic way, as though it were following them. They begin to argue about what it could be. Barney takes the binoculars and sees that the object is elongated, with pulsing lights that shift from red and orange to green and blue.

By now the dog is more and more distressed, and the object keeps closing in. When it is very near, Barney takes the binoculars again, steps out of the car, and walks toward it. The multicolored lights have gone, and the object now shows a single, even white glow. Two red lights come on at its sides the moment he leaves the car. Frightened, but pulled by a powerful urge to get closer, Barney keeps walking, ignoring his wife’s shouts from inside the car begging him to come back. When he is a few dozen meters from the craft, he sees that it has transparent panels, and through them he can make out uniformed silhouettes watching him. Through the binoculars he sees a small being with sharp eyes, who seems to be the leader, looking right at him, while the others behind are busy with something. Soon Barney’s fear overcomes his curiosity and he runs back to the car. As soon as he reaches it, he speeds off down the road, and the couple begin to hear an irritating electronic sound, like a “beep,” that makes the car shudder. Surprised, they pass a sign showing they are already very close to home, without having realized how far they had come.

When they get home, they notice that their watches have stopped, and they see they took much longer than expected, around two hours longer. Barney also realizes his shoes are unusually worn. In the days that follow, at the urging of Betty’s sister, they decide to notify the US Air Force, and they are told that the light they saw had indeed appeared on the radar of an air base nearby. Betty also starts having nightmares about what happened, in which the couple meet the beings Barney described. Some months later, after getting in touch with NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, the Hills begin to wonder why they got home so late on the night of the incident. They retrace the route they took, but reach no conclusion. Around this time Barney develops an ulcer and a nervous breakdown brought on by his high blood pressure, and warts appear on his abdomen in the shape of a circle, which leave him worried.

Two years on, after Barney’s treatment and several meetings with groups investigating the UFO phenomenon, in December 1963 the Hills go to see the psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, known for his work in hypnotic regression. Once Dr. Simon knows their story, he begins regression therapy with them, first together and then separately. In these sessions Betty and Barney piece together their journey that night in 1961, revealing events they could not remember.

According to them, shortly after they began hearing the irritating “beep” inside the car, Barney realizes that, inexplicably, he is no longer on the road they had been driving, but on a small dirt track in the middle of scrubland. Up ahead, they see a group of men in the distance signaling them to stop, in what looks like an accident, since the road is lit. The car stops working and the figures approach. Barney can now see that they are the beings he had seen earlier in the flying object. He tries in vain to start the car, and Betty opens her door to run into the woods, but the beings manage to seize them both. Barney begins to lose consciousness, falling into a kind of trance brought on by the beings’ eyes, eyes that tell him not to be afraid.

The beings drag the Hills to their craft, set down in a clearing nearby, despite Betty’s struggle to get free. One of them begins to speak to her in accented English, and inside the craft the couple undergo a series of examinations much like ordinary medical exams. When Barney comes round, he is surrounded by the beings, who have removed his clothes and are examining him. Betty, meanwhile, is being studied in a room next door, where she is told they will give her a pregnancy test. One of the beings takes a very long needle and pushes it into her navel, causing her great pain. Another being puts a hand over her eyes and the pain disappears.

The examinations end and Betty is left alone with the being who seems to be the leader. She tells him no one will believe what happened, and he answers that she may take something as proof of her visit to the craft, so she picks up a book lying somewhere. Then she asks where they came from, and the leader shows her a star map marked with routes. He asks if she can identify where they are, and seeing that she cannot, says there is no point telling her where they came from. While he puts the map away, a group of beings arrives, very agitated, having discovered that Barney’s teeth could be removed. Barney wore dentures after a road accident. Betty tries to explain that it is very common for people to wear false teeth, especially as they grow old, but the beings seem to have no notion of physical wear, of aging, or even of what time is.

Barney is brought to Betty by two of the beings, and the leader says that, if they decide so, they will meet again. As the couple are led out of the craft, the leader takes the book from Betty’s hands. She protests, but he says the rest of the crew did not agree to her taking proof, that they wanted the couple, for their own good, to forget everything that had happened. Then they are taken back to their car, and the beings return inside the craft, which lifts off again and vanishes into the night.

The Hills’ story is very famous in UFO research, since it was the first abduction case ever reported to specialists. It is worth noting that after that night Betty found herself caught up in many more UFO sightings, of lesser importance, and later wrote a book, “A Common Sense Approach to UFOs,” in which she describes how her involvement with the beings continued throughout her life, receiving “messages” from them over the years. There is even an account in which she says that, on a night out with a group of UFO enthusiasts, lights were seen in the sky, for which she has photographic proof, tracing out what could clearly be read as the letters “IUC,” to which Betty turned to the sky and shouted, “No! It’s wrong! It’s ICU.” (ICU, “I see you.”) Because of the illnesses that struck Barney after the encounter, he died at the end of the 1960s.

To close, it is worth adding that although the leader Betty spoke with did not say exactly where he came from, investigators reached a conclusion about the likely origin of these beings. Under hypnosis, Betty said the being had shown her a star map. Since the map was marked with routes, she remembered enough to sketch how it had looked. A group of investigators studied the sketch and tried to find a match in star charts, without success. But a schoolteacher from Ohio, Miss Marjorie Fish, pointed out that if extraterrestrial beings were to draw a star map, they would surely not draw it from the point of view of someone living on Earth. So she built a three-dimensional model of stars within 50 light-years of our solar system that might plausibly hold life, leaving out those too dim or too bright, too large or too small. From the resulting model of about twelve stars, she concluded that if you viewed them from one of them, you would get a map much like the one Betty had drawn in the room where Dr. Simon hypnotized her. The stars that seem to mark the beings’ point of origin are Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 of the constellation Reticulum, visible from the Southern Hemisphere. According to the specialists who studied the Hill map, the routes that appear on it even seem to be the most logical way for someone to travel between that group of stars.