After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The First Alien Abduction

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

In 1961 Betty and Barney Hill became the first people ever to be abducted by aliens. Their story of being taken and examined by extraterrestrials on board a spaceship became the blueprint that others would follow. Whether you believe it or not, their account would go on to change our world...Maddy tells Anthony the story this week.Written by Maddy Pelling. Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

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True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Wherever you get your podcasts. It's a balmy and clear September night in New Hampshire, USA. This year, 1961 to be precise, the fall colours are starting to come in a little early. Everywhere along the White Mountains, burned oranges and reds are taking over, though of course this late at night they're hardly in their full brilliance. It's quiet here amongst the trees, huge swathes of forest cut up by white snaking roads. There's no traffic, most tourists and hikers went home hours ago, and the only sounds are those of the deep wilderness. Then, quite suddenly, a car rounds a corner, its headlights throwing dark shadows scurrying up the pines that line its route. Music is playing on the

radio and inside its occupants, Barney and Betty Hill, are chatting merrily. They're on their way home from a trip across the border in Canada, their honeymoon in fact. Barney, a postman, and his new wife Betty, a social worker, have been looking forward to this since their wedding over a year ago now, though life has been so busy they've only just found time to get away. The journey back to their home in Portsmouth will take a little while yet, though the pair are enjoying each other's company so much the duration is of little consequence. As they talk and joke together, Betty notices something in the sky. Is that the moon? She asks, giggling. Not the moon, no. A shooting star, then?

No, not that either. It's moving too erratically. What is it, then? Is it... Betty's smile begins to slip. Is it following us? Barney, a World War II veteran, is always cool in a crisis, and he doesn't want to alarm Betty. Of course it's not following us, though the thing in the sky, it's getting bigger now, does seem to be directly alongside them. It zips in and out of the tree line in the dark. It seems vast, made up of many lights. Barney's heart is beating a little faster than usual. I might pull over, he says stoically, just to check it out. Betty agrees. The car slows, throwing gravel up at the side of the road.

Barney reaches under the driver's seat and gropes around before retrieving a pair of binoculars. A second dive brings a revolver. The pair step cautiously out of the car. The first thing that strikes them is the quiet. Suddenly, they're very aware they were, until a few seconds ago, the only ones out here making noise. There's no one else here now. Just silence. Then there it is again, this time not darting about, zigzagging, but heading straight for them. A huge floating vessel lined at the base with bright lights and are those figures moving around it for what seems like an eternity barney and betty hill stare up at the sky then nothing

they come to and they're back in the car. But they're miles down the road, nowhere near where they were just minutes ago. It's still dark, a deeper, blacker darkness than before. What time is it? They notice with a jolt that both their watches have stopped. Frozen. When they finally arrive home, the pair are speechless. They stare at each other.

Betty's dress, Barney notes, confused, is torn. The zipper hangs loose and there's a pinkish powder on the skirt. His shoes, too, are scuffed, as though he'd been running from or fighting something. I have questions, I have thoughts and I have comments. But before we get into that, hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddy. And in this episode, we are going to be, as you can probably imagine, reliving a close encounter, but with a bit of a difference.

And this is the story of Barney and Betty Hill. I'm stopping there for my first comment. Isn't Barney and Betty the names of Fred Flintstone's friends in the Flintstones? I think so. But anyway, that's one of the things to point out, first of all. And this story of Barney and Betty Hill is extraterrestrial in nature. And it's also a tale of, which is why we're covering it on After Dark, of the Cold War, of racial tensions in 1960s America, and of the frontiers of both, I suppose, psychological investigation and space exploration. And that's not all. There are very real and tangible traces in the archive that make this story, I don't know,

it's so tantalising for anybody who's interested in the darker, stranger side of history, which of course, we are here on After Dark. Anthony, had you heard of this case before today? Literally 0% finance, nothing. That's so interesting. Never heard any of this before. So I think it's a bigger story in America. And something that will become clear over the course of this episode is

that this encounter, this moment in history, whatever happens, the stories of it that are told afterwards become almost a blueprint for alien encounters in film and television and in quote-unquote real life as well. It really is the first major cultural moment of this happening in 1961. So as you mentioned at the top there, the context for this taking place in 1961, we've got the Cold War happening in America and there's often a connection made between alien encounters, so-called alien encounters, and psychological fear, particularly in America in this period. There's a sense of impending doom happening. And I suppose an invisible enemy, an enemy that is just out of reach, that's maybe coming from the skies. There's huge threat of nuclear war in this

period. We've got the first atomic bomb being dropped in Japan at the end of the Second World War in 1945, a global conflict in which we know Barney Hill himself takes part. We've got the USSR across the globe, away from America, testing nuclear weapons into the 1960s. There's huge tests going on. There's an arms race, really. And alongside that, there's also a turning of attention in the USSR and in the USA towards space. The space race has begun in 1957. And as well as this fear about nuclear attack, nuclear devastation on planet Earth, there's a growing interest, and I suppose it comes with the territory, there's a growing anxiety about extraterrestrial life, what is out there in space, how to access it, and what the consequences of that will be. We've also got the civil rights movement happening in America,

and there's often violent clashes going on, as well as peaceful protest. So the civil rights movement by 1961, in the moment of our story, is already in full force. We've had Rosa Parks famously refusing to get off the bus in Alabama in 1955. We've got the Little Rock High School in Arkansas that's integrated with black and white students attending the same Alabama in 1955. We've got the Little Rock High School in Arkansas that's integrated with black and white students attending the same classes in 1957. And in the spring of 1961, when Barney and Betty Hill have their experience, there are the Freedom Rides. So these are protests by black and white activists that seek to test the boundaries of new rulings brought in by the Supreme Court that ban segregation on public transport. And many of the people that take part

in these protests face intimidation and in many cases, violence as well. So that's the backdrop to this. And it's important to consider this particular backdrop because Barney and Betty Hill are an interracial couple. Betty is white and Barney is African-American. I think we can think about this in terms of our own experiences at the moment as well. We have a threat of potential global war happening across the world. We have actual war that's unfolding in multiple different locations right now. We are in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and other movements that have been calling for racial, social, gender equality. And within that,

there is this sense, I think, that we don't quite know what's going to happen next, that there is this unknown element that you could wake up tomorrow. And of course, we've had the COVID pandemic as well. So this idea of just outside threat, actual physical violence, actual war, conflict, social and cultural movements, it brings up so many questions and it makes for a very volatile setting in which anything seems possible. I agree. And I think the feeling of unease and unsettlement is something we can certainly relate to. I wonder as well, and this is just occurring to me. So I have here in my notes, lots about the fact that aliens become part of pop culture in this moment. And I'm

thinking in our own moment, if we could view maybe the absolute explosion of interest in fantasy writing, fantasy TV shows, films, as something similar in our own time, a sort of search for entertainment beyond the pretty grim and scary reality of our own moment, something that allows us to step out of it, that allows us to express those fears and anxieties and give them other names, other forms, an arena in which to address those safely. Right. So take us back to 1961 then,

Maddy. We have Barney, we have Betty. Tell us a little bit about this couple. Yes. So these are the two main actors, main characters in the story. So Barney Hill, let's start with him, is born in 1923. He's African American. He is the son of a shipyard worker. He's born in Newport News, which I'm reliably informed is in Virginia. Any listeners in Virginia, write in and tell me if that's correct. He has served in the US Army during the Second World War, a time when the army itself was desegregated for the first time. I think it's the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. That's the first time black soldiers fight alongside their white colleagues.

And what's so interesting about Barney, I think, is that he is claimed in multiple sources, talking about this story and about this couple, that he had an IQ of 140. And I find this fascinating, this is mentioned mentioned so much because it serves to set up his trustworthiness his credibility and as we will find as we go on he's the more skeptical of the two when it comes to this alien encounter he has a similar experience to betty but he rationalizes it in a completely different way and And he's not as keen to

talk about it as she maybe is later on. So it's very interesting that the fact that he's fought in the army and that he has this really high IQ is mentioned all the time. By the time he meets Betty, he's a postal worker. He's working in Philadelphia. He's married with two children, but he meets Betty and he's absolutely not sideways, and he leaves his family to be with her. They were quite a religious couple, they regularly attended church, and they were both deeply involved with the civil rights movement and the various administrative branches of that in New Hampshire. So Betty, or Eunice Betty Barrett, as she was before she met Barney, afterwards Betty Hill, was a white lady. She's a New Hampshire native and she's born in 1919. So she's actually a little bit older than

Barney. She's a graduate from the University of New Hampshire and she was working at the time of this alien experience as a social worker. So i think they're both very interesting characters and they seem to me to be very engaged at a grassroots level with a lot of the social change that's going on in society around them i have a photo of them yes we love a photo on after dark we love a photo we will put this up on instagram and if you don't follow us you can find us both there and we will include this image anth Anthony, describe this image because I think it's a very narrativized image. There's a lot to unpack. It's really making me smile.

I saw as I scrolled down, I was like, oh my God, this is hysterical. Okay. And it gives you such a sense of them as well. Yeah, it really does. It's really like you said, narrativized. It's very that you're getting. Okay, I'll describe it for people

so they're not trying to guess what we're talking about. Okay, buckle up guys. This is a fun one. So we have Betty in the left foreground and Betty has that typical 1960s hairdo that looks a little bit like a helmet. It looks to be straight across her forehead and covering her ears, but it's short at the same time. It's everyone's grandma's hair. Yeah, yeah, I guess it is. Yes. Except coloured brown in this instance. And she looks to be a character. She is looking towards Barney, who is holding in the centre of the background of the picture, he's holding a drawing, it looks to be, of what they have encountered. But beside Betty, to the right foreground of the picture, is a dog also looking at the picture. I don't know why

that's tickling me so much. But also, I need to come back to Betty, because Betty is smiling away like this might be the best day of her actual life. Whatever facial expression she is doing is somewhat infectious. Okay, let me describe the flying saucer that Barney is pointing to. Barney's nicely dressed in a suit and tie, and he is pointing to what looks like fluffy pancakes rather than the flat pancakes, the fluffy ones that have a little bit of an edge to them. And in that edge, it looks like it's kind of maybe glass or something because he's drawn little divisions within that. And there are figures within the divisions. And then there is these two kind of triangular things coming off the either side that have little ball-y looking yokes in the side of it. That was very specific.

Yeah, but I am obsessed with this picture. Why is it making me laugh so much? Like they're not doing anything particularly hilarious. I will say it looks like Barney is lit as well, by the way, because his shadow is cast behind him. Like nowadays you'd just be like, oh, it's his ring light. But obviously there was no ring lights back then. It looks like he's been lit though. this is a posed photograph yeah it looks like a

press photo yeah yeah they seem fun i want to get to know them better i think from this image they seem like a laugh it's interesting that you know to the dog as well of course he noticed the dog in some versions of their encounter that i've read The dog is with them in the car. And other times he's not mentioned. So we don't have the dog's testimony. We don't have the dog's witness statement. We don't know. We don't know.

The other thing that strikes me about Benny particularly is he's made to look, you were talking about this earlier, but he's made to look very trustworthy. He's in his suit and tie, as I mentioned. We're seeing hints of it being a very respectable family home. There's hints of interior decoration just with respectable family home. There's hints at interior

decoration just with the lamp there. He's by his door. It looks like quite a nice door. So there is this sense of respectability that's surrounding them in this image. But this is just the beginning really. Can you tell me what happened once they actually reported this to some of the authorities? once they actually reported this to some of the authorities. In the days following their strange experience in the New Hampshire mountains, Barney and Betty struggle to make sense of it. Betty in particular can't shake the feeling there is more to this than she remembers. Each night, she dreams terrible visions, and in the morning, attempts to write down each detail she can recall. She's convinced the truth of what

happened to them is locked deep in her mind. Barney is more sceptical. Perhaps he just wants to forget the whole thing, or so he tells his wife. In the weeks afterwards, the pair begin to feel unwell. It is, Barney says, the stress of it all, of not knowing exactly what happened. Neither one is sleeping well, though Betty's awful dreams have thankfully stopped for now. In an attempt to exercise the whole thing, Barney and Betty decide to head back into the mountains. It's a long drive and silence sits heavily between them as they wind their way between the trees. Going back to the site of their encounter will, they hope, bring them some peace. They drive around, looking for the exact spot they stopped the car

and got out. Everywhere up here looks the same, and they soon abandon the trip altogether. But by now, it's clear the pair need help. They need to tell their story to someone. They can't keep it, whatever it actually is, inside any longer. Wendy's has a new breakfast deal. We'll be right back. time at participating Wendy's in Canada. Taxes extra. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Right, so they go back to the scene of the sighting

in the hope of potentially seeing something else again, which is slightly fascinating. I have a question. Do you know if they were accompanied on that? Was that a media trip or was that just them going themselves? So at this point, it's just them. And this is a really interesting moment in their story. It's a transitional moment when they go from keeping this encounter initially to themselves, trying to deal with what's happened and not telling anyone. deal with what's happened and not telling anyone. And pretty soon, the story is going to go out into the world. And the photograph that we saw of them, as you say, is very much a performed press photograph. It's lit theatrically, it's shot professionally. They are about to become

celebrities. But before they get to that point, they try and deal with what's happened internally in their own family. That's fascinating because initially when you were describing the, you know, she's waking up, she's writing stuff down. Initially, my feelings were, okay, she's seeing this story has some mileage and she's trying to elongate that mileage, if that makes sense. She's trying to get more out of it so that the press keep coming back. but actually they haven't even gone to the press at this point. So this seems to be driven by personal reflection, personal reaction, and by the sounds of it, some form of trauma. Yes. And I think we have to remember that Barney and Betty, as far as they're concerned, they've had a really terrifying experience. And today,

we may be because of the cultural legacy of this case and others like it, we tend to take these stories with a bit of a pinch of salt. But in 1961, you're alone in the mountains in a really rural place in a time when you're afraid of things falling from the sky, i.e. nuclear weapons, you're an interracial couple traveling through the rural countryside at a time when there's huge racial tension. And that anxiety, whether it manifests itself in terms of this encounter, or whether something really happens to them, I think we must remember that for them, the fear is very, very real. And there's not been anything like this reported in the news, and certainly not infiltrated into popular culture in the way that it's about to be. So whatever happened, I think

we have to take their fear seriously. And that is one of the reasons why they don't initially go to the press. They're not looking to sell their story because these stories don't necessarily have any value, any media currency yet. And I think we need to take their fear at this moment seriously. And that I think explains their behaviour in the coming days and weeks after, including going back to the same spot, right, to try and make sense of what's happened. Now, you know, I can be very dismissive of some of these type of things when it comes to After Dark, where we're talking about sightings or,

you know, when we talk about Loch Ness, whatever it might have been. But there is something credible about this couple and about the way in which the narrative unfolds. Because if I'm not mistaken, the next thing that Betty does is she reports the incident to the US Air Force. For that then to be your first port of call, that's almost the most credible thing you could do in reaction. Yeah. So there's an airbase called Pease Air Force Base, which is near to where they live. And Betty goes within a few days of this encounter to report it. The Air Force turn her away and say they're not interested. But then she also goes to an institution that's already been set up in America

called the National Investigation Committee of Aerial Phenomenon, the NICAP for short. And this is a civilian organization that's been operating from the 1950s. And I think it keeps going until the 1980s. And it's interested in, as it says, aerial phenomena. And again, we're thinking about this Cold War context as well as possible aliens. And they take it a little bit more seriously. So one of the members of the NICAP is an astronomer who's called Walter Webb.

And he is from Boston. And he actually meets the Hills he sets up a meeting with them at the end of that year in October 1961 and he actually sits down and they have a six-hour interview in which the Hills relate everything that's happened importantly we should say everything they can remember yeah because obviously there's a huge period of time in their experience that's missing when they encounter what they think is a spaceship and then they wake up miles down the road and there's something so insidious about that i mean whether you want to believe that they've met

aliens or not that's a very frightening experience yeah absolutely and this feeling that betty has communicated already that she is not remembering something, that's very frightening too. It really is. So they have this meeting with Walter Webb and they set down everything they can. And I think at this point he makes recordings of them speaking about their experiences. So they're not looking to sell their story yet. They're trying to make sense of it with other people who are interested in having those conversations. But they start to realise quite quickly, I think,

that they're going to need some kind of professional help. They're both really traumatised. Something's happened to them. They're not really sure what, and they need some help. So they seek out a psychiatrist, and they come across a man called Benjamin Simon, who specialises in hypnosis, which was a fairly typical treatment, I believe, in the mid 20th century. It was already sort of established. Can I just check here, Maddy? They sought out the psychiatrist themselves. Nobody suggested they should go to this person. This person didn't approach them. They said, I think I need some help here. I'm going to seek out a psychiatrist.

So my understanding is that it's sort of part of this broader network of people interested in these strange phenomena that I think they come across, Benjamin Simon. If that is the case, there's a question mark there then about his interest in alien encounters and his willingness to maybe believe them. So there's maybe a little bit of a question about that but he's a medical professional and they go to him and over the course of many many hours spent in hypnosis together and separately the couple are able to fill in the blanks of what's happened to them and the results are really extraordinary there are details that vary between barney and betty's account but overall they do match and they're being brought out during

hypnosis so this isn't necessarily a conscious performance of false information if you are going to be skeptical about it and one thing that they do during these sessions is to produce drawings under hypnosis of their experiences. So as well as the photograph that we've already discussed, I want you to describe two images, particularly the second, which is drawn by Betty under hypnosis. The first image that I have is the image

that Barney was pointing towards in the first photograph. This is a hand-drawn image of that puffy pancake spaceship type thing. There are two versions of it this time, and the second version is pretty much precisely what Barney had drawn in the professional photograph. There's some words on that too. We'll put that one on social so you can look at it specifically. The second one. Okay. I have no idea what I'm looking at. Okay. I'm just going to describe it as I see it. It looks to me like an upside down tripod that is falling over. The page is stained with what looks like tea. There are little dots all over the page. Some of them are joined up with little dashes.

This is chaos to me. I'm going to put you out of your misery. Okay, this is a intergalactic map. How did I not recognize it instantly? Exactly. So this is something that Betty draws. And where she gets her information from to draw this is very very fascinating the map itself in 1961 nobody recognizes what part of the universe it's depicting it doesn't

match anything in astronomical charts yeah but there are later theories that it could be an identifiable part of the universe which is quite mind-blowing so we're about to hear the blanks that betty and barney are able to fill in under hypnosis now i don't know where i stand on this you know before i was like okay they seem like credible people and there's something about this that's knocking me for six a little bit. Okay, tell me the next bit. Through months of weekly sessions, psychiatrist Benjamin Simon helped Barney and Betty piece together the details of that fateful night.

Under hypnosis, the pair were both, separately, able to recall men in the road, all standing around a roadblock. Next, there was a vessel in the air. It had, each told Simon, landed on or near their car, putting them to sleep instantly. Next, they remembered tall, grey beings with huge black eyes and military-like uniforms, walking them up a ramp and onto the spaceship itself. Once inside, Barney and Betty had, they claimed, been separated. Each was placed in an examination room, where they were asked to sit on a table and undergo tests. Betty remembered the brightness of the ship,

a large light that hung down during her examination, and one figure, whom she called the leader, watching over everything. Her clothes were removed, clippings of nails and scrapings of skin were taken, needles connected to long wires pricked her arms, legs and head. One large needle, inches long, was even inserted into her stomach. She screamed and writhed in pain and so the being stopped. Somewhat bizarrely, given the nature of the encounter and the terror both Barney and Betty

felt, there were moments of humour each could recall. During the examinations, Betty told Simon, one of the beings rushed into the room, excited to discover Barney's teeth could be removed. Betty laughed and tried to explain her husband wore dentures. Betty's recollections of the night were particularly detailed. She claimed under hypnosis that she had met with the leader and even conversed in English, though separately Barney described the language as indecipherable grunts. According to Betty, when she asked where the beings had come from, the leader replied, if you don't know where you are, there wouldn't be any point in telling you where I am.

In 1965, the Hill story was picked up by a Boston newspaper. The details of their stories, by a Boston newspaper. The details of their stories, retold and compared under hypnosis, made for compelling reading. After that, everything changed. Right. My spidey senses are tingling. Go on, hit me with it. Benjamin Simon is where I want to go first, the psychiatrist. Now, I am by no means an expert in psychiatry or hypnosis or where the two things meet. Nonetheless, my understanding that I do have would suggest to me that should Benjamin Simon have an interest in this topic, which he does, that he could use hypnosis as a way to inform these

accounts to his own ends in a similar way that someone like Arthur Conan Doyle was using manipulating the Cottingley fairy pictures to feed into his narrative of these wonderful beings happening in the English countryside. So it strikes me there's the possibility there that we need to look at Benjamin Simon a little bit closely. And so we move from this idea of one of the first alien abductions to an idea of the history of psychiatry here and the ethics of psychiatry at a time when I know it's changing. I know that much as well that the 1960s is not the beginning of psychiatry, but it's certainly a pivot point at which the discipline is emerging.

So that's interesting. What's also interesting is it's almost too perfect, especially Betty's account. It is lyrical. It's specific. It's quite sentiment driven in many ways. There's fear. There's laughter.

You are invited to feel things about this sighting. specific. It's quite sentiment driven in many ways. There's fear, there's laughter, there is, you are invited to feel things about this sighting and subsequent abduction. If you were looking at comparing accounts, one of the things that I'm a little suspicious about is this idea of the tall grey beings that is described. But actually, if you look at that initial drawing that they've done, okay, I know it's literally just a sketch, but the beings that are very slightly depicted in that or very vaguely depicted in that don't look like tall, slender things at all. They actually look like quite squat and quite short. I wonder if these two people have been taken advantage of. That's where my mind is at at the moment. Let's unpack some of that.

So let's go with simon first benjamin simon the psychiatrist my understanding is that a huge amount of the paper archive left by this case and we're talking the drawings that betty and barney did we're talking simon's notes and tape recordings at least some of that is in an archive now at the New Hampshire University. If Simon did have an interest in reshaping the narrative slightly, the paper trail of his work is visible. So there is that. Yet it is his paper trail, right? It's still all from his, well, mostly from a perspective that he could have manipulated

i guess so the drawings are i mean reportedly by barney and betty themselves but produced under hypnosis so there is an interesting question there i think one of the most interesting elements of this for me is the physical experience of this that she talks about what is almost a sexualized experience she talks about having her clothes taken off her body is invaded in all these different ways and that big needle that is stuck into her stomach it's described in a lot of accounts as a sort of rudimentary pregnancy test i wonder wonder two things here. I wonder if there's something in Betty's mind, an anxiety about having a child with Barney and what it would mean to raise a mixed race child in America in the 1960s, if that's something that she's fearful of,

or at least something that she's thinking about in detail and if that's maybe coming into this experience in some way i also wonder if something a little bit more sinister happened that night something that both barney and betty recall very vividly when they're under hypnosis is a roadblock and men stopping their car and then the vessel appears which isn't the story that they tell at the beginning this is something that comes out during hypnosis we were in a very rural area here i wonder if there's something in that if there's a real experience and a real trauma here that's been buried deeply i get your point. To counter it, I will question whether or not Betty is of childbearing age. I think that's questionable. I don't want to cast any aspersions on her age or her fertility

based on the picture, but from the picture I've seen, it may suggest that she was beyond childbearing years. I see what you're saying. I think for the two of them to bury a physical attack seems to me unlikely, not impossible, but unlikely. My suspicion still sticks with Benjamin Simon, with the psychiatrist and whatever genuine fear, as you say, because I think there is some genuine fear there or some anxiety. But it feels to me his agenda is coming into play quite strongly here okay so you're you've got him in your sights okay what i think we can remember at this point is the fact that and you you've just sort of spelled it out there really that barney and betty are still fearful of their experience whatever did happen to them or whatever they feel happened to them and don't forget there were physical evidences of this betty's torn dress barney's scuffed shoes their watches supposedly stopped working and this is evidence that could all be faked arguably if we're going to look at this as one big hoax or something that they're in in on together and betty's dress survived and was

archived at some point i'm not sure if it still exists but it was you know certainly an object of interest to alien hunters in the decades afterwards okay so their story does get picked up by the press but one thing i want to say before that is that Benjamin Simon does come out and say he does not think they've been abducted by aliens. Oh. So you had it in for him all along. His theory is that Betty is having really vivid dreams. And we know that she's reported having quite nightmarish dreams in the days after this supposed encounter. He thinks that they are the root of everything that's going on and that Barney has picked up on these dreams, that he is

absorbing what she's saying the next day about them and he's recalling them under hypnosis mistakenly as his own experience, which is a fascinating process. And it says a lot about their intimacy as a couple and the suggestibility of those kinds of narratives and people's experiences, witnessing an event or a moment and how that can so easily become twisted. In the eyes of a psychiatrist, at least, he's setting out a theory of this twisting and this not necessarily purposeful manipulation of the story but there's mistakes being made here by Barney and Betty and that absorbing things and taking accidental prompts from each other I was very suspicious of the NICAP so just to recap that it's the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. And I had assumed that there was a link between Simon and that organisation. Yeah, so I was just

suspicious of his involvement and with his involvement with maybe some of the material culture, i.e. the dress, had he manipulated some of those things, but not if he's coming out to say, look, this isn't an abduction, then that scuppers that. Yeah. And the other thing to say, which I've been reading a lot about Betty's potential, the sort of sexualized nature of her experience, and there's a lot of scholarship in psychology and by historians about people in early modern witch trials claiming to have had similar sexual encounters with the devil or with evil spirits that betty's claiming to have had with an alien and the scholarship around that seems to say that people include these details either subconsciously and they really

believe it happened or intentionally because they make it seem more compelling it makes the encounter seem otherworldly and more likely to have happened it's such a specific thing to describe happening so i think that's very interesting but whatever the truth is the story cannot be contained any longer and in 1965 so this is four years after the initial experience it is long time and they spent a long time working with simon in these hypnotized states trying to get to the bottom of it but finally in 1965 the story does make the front page of the boston traveler with a fantastic headline ufo chiller did they seize the couple? And they is capitalized, they, the other, the aliens. And supposedly, the reporter had got hold of the audio tapes of a lecture that the Hills had given

in 1963. And now this is interesting that whilst they're in their treatment for hypnosis, they do start to tell their story locally. They tell their story to some friends at church, and they start to tell the story to people with a growing interest in alien encounters. They're not necessarily courting the press at that point, but the fact that there are tape recordings made of a lecture they're giving suggests the story is growing. It's gaining a public profile. And maybe in that constant retelling that they're doing, maybe the details are changing. Maybe their idea of what has happened to them is constantly evolving and being added to. Whether they are consciously doing that or not i don't know and there is we should say there is some discrepancy as well between betty and barney's stories here barney starts to want to step back from this a little bit he isn't enjoying the interest that they're beginning to get and by the time it comes out in the press he goes along with it and obviously we've seen him in a press photo and things holding up the photo of the drawing of the alien encounter

so he goes along with it to a certain extent but it really seems to be betty that's the driving force from this point onwards once the story enters the press she is the sort of face of this and her ripped dress her experience with this big needle that's put into her stomach, all of that becomes the sensational focus. And a blueprint, slightly, for what's to follow in terms of the details that one encounters when one is abducted by aliens, the undescribable thing in the sky that becomes slightly more clear, that then becomes a spaceship, that then has these tall grey beings on board, that there is then an abduction, there's probing probing yes the medical tests are such a key part yes so it becomes blueprint because in 1966 so a year after the story enters the press and it goes international like it's in newspapers all around the world and certainly in america it's

a really big news item but in 1966 a writer called John Fuller teams up with Betty and Barney and he basically ghost writes a version of their account in a book called The Interrupted Journey to Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer and it's that text that really is then picked up by filmmakers, TV writers everywhere. So the story does start to appear in pop culture. In 1975, for example, there's a TV movie called The UFO Incident that stars Estelle Parsons as Betty and James Earl Jones as Barney. So they themselves, their particular story, they are put onto the small screen, the TV screen.

But then in 1977, of course we have the spielberg film close encounters of a third kind which very much borrows from their experiences have you ever seen that film that's one of my favorite films absolutely not why would i watch that oh i hate i hate them it's very good it's very tense it's a spielberg it's a classic you must watch it it's very very good i would say better than et.T. I haven't seen that either. Controversial. Oh my God, Anthony. There's so many movies.

So many of those like staple movies that I haven't seen. We're going to stop recording immediately now and just pause this while Anthony and I watch E.T. My God. So really the Betty and Barney Hill story, I think for us interested in this as historians is that it is picked up by the press. It's picked up in popular culture and it really has a lasting legacy. Now the New York Times in 2004 wrote an

obituary of Betty when she died. And don't forget as wonderful as I'm sure she was, that she was a social worker. She didn't have a particularly big profile in the world with the exception of her involvement in this story. So she appears in an obituary in the new times and the writer margaret fox wrote of betty the account that betty gave fits squarely into the western narrative tradition with a dark night ghostly apparitions and sexual undercurrent it had many victorian gothic hallmarks and shared the common western folklore theme of being spirited off and ravaged by other worldly creatures and i think that's so spot on that it yeah whether or not we believe that it really happened to them i think it's fair to say there are very established elements of storytelling

that they borrow from that are very clear in their account and that then go on with a specific reference to aliens to be this template for how we tell those stories. And it's worth bearing in mind as we wrap up, I suppose, that their story is informed by a much longer history of alien encounter, what we would now term alien encounter. But their story is a pivotal point in what follows, in what we now understand as the mythology around telling UFO encounters. So it's a really pinpointed moment in this long history, actually much longer than the 1960s, of this alien encounter. And it shapes what I suppose we know about alien encounters today. The other thing to say, finally, finally for listeners is that the university of

new hampshire as i think i already mentioned holds the barney and betty hill collection and this is photographs notes the ephemera that they you know piece of paper they draw on all of that and it's all online you can go and look at it today and it's a really fascinating archive to look through and you get a real sense of who they were as a couple and what this encounter meant to them in their lives because whatever happened that night did change the course of their lives and threw them onto an international stage whether they chose that or not and on that we shall leave you there thank you for joining us for another episode of after dark if you've enjoyed this episode or any of our other episodes please leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts it It helps other people find us too. And until next time, sleep tight. $4 breakfast wrap biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small seasoned potatoes or small hot coffee. Choose two for $4 at Wendy's available for a limited time at participating Wendy's in

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