claimed
to have been abducted by extraterrestrials on September 16, 1961.
Their
story, commonly called the Hill Abduction and occasionally the Zeta Reticuli
Incident, was the first widely publicised UFO abduction report.
She was interviewed and
has stated the following - "I
do not believe in afterlife - The World as we know it will exist - until
we die ( as individuals ) - then the world ( earth ) will continue to exist.
It will NOT destruct as some have said - There are a lot of people out there
who want to make money out of this (UFO) situation - They are money makers
only interested in money." It is of great interest
that Betty Hill was NOT one of those "money makers". She could
have easily "milked" the UFO market for the dollars - but instead
kept in the background and did not seek the dollar. She was (in my opinion)
a real person - caught up in a situation that she could not fully understand
- an event that occurred "outside this world".
What Happened ?
That evening while driving back to their Portsmouth,
New Hampshire area home from a vacation in Canada, the Hills spotted a light
in the sky that seemed to be following them. They reported that the object
came closer, and was clearly a craft. Barney was concerned that the occupants
intended to kill or capture them, so he stopped to retrieve a firearm from
the car's trunk. He became extremely worried, and started to panic. He then claimed to have seen human-like creatures peering
at him through windows on the craft. He drove away quickly, but the Hills later reported so-called "lost
time": several hours seemed to have passed without their recollection,
and they were at a location different from where they had stopped the car.
Betty was especially troubled
by the incident and, in the weeks and months and years afterward, read a
number of UFO-related books. Previously she had little knowledge or interest in either UFO's or the universe.
In late 1963, Two years after the incident
, the couple sought hypnosis, hoping it might help them recover what actually
happened.
Especially why they were at a different location to where they
stopped the car - and what happened to the missing time.
Under hypnosis sessions
in 1963, the Hills recounted what later became the standard UFO abduction
template: They seemed hypnotised or paralysed, and were unable to resist
the apparent medical examinations they were forced to undergo. Their abductors
were described as more or less human, though with very large eyes and small
noses. Barney described their clothing as resembling military uniforms.
While on the craft, Betty reported seeing
a hologram-like star map, which she assumed depicted the craft's home planet.
She later sketched this map from memory.
Marjorie Fish, an astronomy enthusiast
- unconnected to the Hills - analysed Betty's sketch and concluded it could have depicted
Zeta Reticuli.
Her re-drawn map is down the page below Betty Hill's hand drawn map
Picture below is Betty Hill's hand drawn star map
There has been an enormous amount of discussion about this map.
Betty
said the man on the ship sort of "produced" a map "from the wall" and
he asked Betty to show where she came from. Naturally Betty looked at
the map, and was puzzled, as most people would be, and Betty asked the
man on the ship where they came from. He showed her a map and said "
where do you come from " to which Betty said in a puzzled way, looking
at the map " I'm not sure " and the man simply took the map away, saying
" if you can't show me where you come from I can't show you where we
come from ". And he folded ( and according to Betty he "sort of folded
the map into the wall" ( it sort of faded into the wall ).
Betty
told the man she knew about our solar system, as she was told about in
school, but admitted that she knew little else about the universe.
Betty asked the man to re-show the map again, to which the man said no.
Betty re-drew the map later and this ignited many discussions about it.
Picture below is Betty Hill's star map as re-drawn by Marjorie Fish
"Astronomy Magazine" printed Fish's
analysis, and the subject was a regular feature of their letters to the
editor column for nearly a year,
with a range of opinions (ranging from
pro to con) offered. Carl Sagan argued that the map was so vague and ambiguous
that any star system or constellation could be matched to it with little
difficulty. Some have dubbed the Hills' account The " Zeta Reticuli
Incident" --, but most Ufologists prefer the Hill Abduction or The
Betty and Barney Hill Story.
There is an updated theory
with regard to the map in question as drawn by Betty Hill under hypnosis.
Two German Scientists, Koch and Kyborg, have proposed that the map was in
reality, drawn from the perspective of the alien spacecraft as it was positioned
to the eyes of the Hill's in the solar system on September 16, 1961 along
US Route 3 near Lincoln NH.
Remember this
map would have been made by someone outside OUR solar system and as
such would have not been marked the same way we would have marked it.
All the names of the planets would be different. What is interesting is
that Betty asked a number of questions such as " why don't you land on
Earth and announce yourselves" to which she got no answer. And "no one
will believe me so can I take something away with me from this ship" to
which the man gave her a book which was filled with vertical columns of
strange "egyptian type figures" ( that Betty had never seen before ) but
another man came into the room, and started talking to the man Betty
had been speaking to in a way Betty did not understand, but appeared to
Betty, to be angry, and then snatched the book off Betty, and left the
room, and then the man she had been speaking to told her " He does not
want you to remember anything about this "
The 1966 publication of Interrupted Journey,
by John G. Fuller, details much of the Hills' claims. Excerpts of the book
were published in Look Magazine, and Interrupted Journey went on to sell
many copies and greatly publicise the Hills' account.
Budd Hopkins writes, " ... the Hill case
bears upon one popular theory which has been widely but uncritically accepted
by many skeptics: the idea that such accounts must have been implanted by
hypnosis, consciously or unconsciously, or by manipulative practitioners
who 'believe in' the reality of such events. Simon, who hypnotised the Hills,
was avowedly skeptical about the reality of the Hills' abduction recollections.
Yet the Hills stubbornly held to their interlocking, hypnotically recovered
accounts despite Simon's suggestions at the end of treatment that their
memories could not be literally true. It can therefore be concluded that
the bias of the hypnotist had nothing to do with the content of their hypnotic
recall."
Barney Hill died of a cerebral
hemorrhage, in 1969, at age 46.
Betty Hill died October 17,
2004.
Betty and Barney Hill had endeavoured to keep
quiet about the whole incident but the matter of their mixed marriage came
out in the media - and a whole string of false statements came out and the
Hills felt compelled to make a statement about the incident.
Psychiatrists later suggested that the supposed
abduction was a hallucination brought on by the stress of being an interracial
couple in early 'sixties America. (Betty was Caucasian, Barney was African
American.) Betty discounted this suggestion,
noting her relationship with Barney was happy, and their interracial marriage
caused no notable problems with their friends or family. Critics
have suggested the Hills' hypnosis brought on confabulation - the blending
of fantasy with memory - arguing that recovered memories are unreliable.
It was unfairly reported that because Betty
and Barney were married (in the early 1960's) as a mixed race couple - that
they "made up " the "story" of the UFO experience. Many
people made fun of the Hills - due to their mixed race marriage - In the
early 1960's a mixed race marriage was considered (at least in the U.S.A.)
a bad thing - a wrong thing.
Some have speculated that the abduction account
was influenced by an episode of The Outer Limits broadcast after the incident
but twelve days before a hypnotic regression performed on the couple to
get more detail on the incident. The report from the regression featured
a scenario similar to the television show. Barney discounted this suggestion,
noting that he usually worked in the evenings, and rarely watched television;
furthermore, before the abduction he says, he had no special interest in
UFOs or science fiction.
Check out Koch and Kyborg's German web page (in english) about the map, and Betty Hill's experience.
It goes into a lot of detail about the Map, and About Bettys experience in the spaceship.
It's well recommended. The link is below. The link was active as of 8th May 2022.
