Strange things happen late at night — so strange, in fact, that one incident from 50 years ago still can’t be explained.
On the evening of September 19, 1961, Barney and Betty Hill were driving home from a vacation in Canada. It was a clear, starry night, and as they followed Route 3 through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, they watched the full moon and Jupiter low in the sky. They then saw a different bright light that, they said, followed them until it was only a few hundred meters from their car.
They stopped, and Barney got out his binoculars. What he saw made him panic. The light, he said, was an aircraft with windows — and through those windows he was being watched. The object continued to get closer, until it was directly over their car. Then the Hills heard a strange beeping sound. The next thing they remembered, they were about 50 kilometers further south, without any memory of the stretch of road in between. When they got home, they discovered that both of their watches had stopped at exactly the same time. A clock in the house indicated they had lost two hours somewhere along the way. Strange, magnetic spots appeared on their car. Barney discovered a pattern of warts on his body.
At first, the Hills agreed not to talk about these strange events to other people, because they felt no one would believe them. But soon Betty began having nightmares. She wrote down what she could remember. And when she showed Barney what she’d written, he began to fill in some of the details of the “missing time”.
The object, a spacecraft, landed in the woods just off of Route 3, near Indian Head. As though in a trance, Barney turned off the road and stopped the car. Several beings led the Hills out of the car and into the spacecraft.
To get the full story, the Hills visited a psychotherapist who put them under hypnosis. They screamed in terror as they described how the aliens led them into separate rooms to do a medical examination. Betty was then able to calm down and have a conversation with the “astronauts”, as she called them. The one she took to be their leader showed her a map of places they went to. He also gave her a book written in an unfamiliar script. But the other aliens made her give it back, as they did not want to leave any evidence of the encounter. “That’s the whole point,” Betty told them tearfully.
The psychotherapist said that the Hills showed symptoms of a trauma that their minds were trying to repress. However, he could not quite accept the idea of an alien encounter. He could not identify any trauma, though, nor any reason why they would make up such a story. The Hills were very respected people in their community. Since Betty remembered more of the events than Barney, the doctor felt it possible that Betty had imagined them and that Barney had been influenced by her telling of the story. But even this was not certain.
The Hills’ story is told in the 1966 book The Interrupted Journey, which was made into the 1975 TV movie The UFO Incident . In a stellar performance, James Earl Jones plays Barney Hill.
If the voice is familiar, it’s because two years later, Jones became the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies.
While under hypnosis, Betty drew the star map she’d seen on the spacecraft. A schoolteacher, Marjorie Fish, spent three years using three-dimensional models of nearby sun-like stars, looking for a match. She found exactly one. The aliens, she said, had come from a double star called Zeta Reticuli.
Fish’s method was sharply criticized by leading astronomer Carl Sagan, who (uncharacteristically) misrepresented some aspects of the Hills’ story — for example, it wasn’t raining that night.
Until their deaths — Barney in 1969, Betty in 2004 — the Hills stood by their story. To them, it was the simplest explanation.
