Imaginary Worlds - From Outer Space

Episode Date: October 30, 2019

Think of an alien abduction: humanoid creatures, medical experiments, lost memories brought back by hypnosis. But that narrative was largely unknown until Betty and Barney Hill went public about their alien abduction in the 1960s. Betty Hill’s niece, Kathleen Marden, tells the story of how her aunt and uncle became unwitting celebrities, and professors Susan Lepselter, Chris Bader, Joseph O. Baker and Stephanie Kelley-Romano explain how the story of the Hills changed UFO subculture and science fiction forever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. We all know that stories are powerful. But is it possible for a story to be so powerful that it takes over your life? And could that story be like a contagion, where everybody who hears it can't stop thinking about it or talking about it, even if they're not sure if the story is true? Well, that is the story of Betty and Barney Hill. The Hills were the first alien abductees, or at least the first ones that the American public had become aware of in the 1960s. And today, if I say alien abduction, you know all the tropes thanks to science fiction.

But most people don't know that story started with one couple in the real world. And tracing this narrative back to its origins can reveal a lot about how a culture can grow and develop to the point where we don't know anymore what's the real story or what's just a story. And to help tell the story of Betty and Barney Hill, I talked with Kathleen Martin. She wrote a book about the Hills, which was called Captured, and the subject is very personal to her. Well, Betty and Barney were my aunt and uncle.

We saw one another one or two times a week. They were also wonderful family members who appreciated other members of the family and especially the children. Another important fact about the Hills, they were an interracial couple. Betty was white. She worked in the welfare department in New Hampshire. Barney was black, and he worked with her local chapter of the NAACP. Hampshire, Barney was black and he worked with their local chapter of the NAACP. On the night of September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney were driving home after a vacation in Montreal. They wanted to drive straight home because Barney was nervous about where they could stop without being harassed. And as they were driving, they noticed a craft following them in the sky.

This aircraft didn't move like an airplane or a helicopter. They were concerned and confused. And eventually Barney pulled over and stopped the car. Barney stepped out. He was still trying to identify it as a conventional craft. He was looking up at it through binoculars and saw the row of windows, as did Betty, saw the lights inside this craft. Then the craft moved.

Barney followed it into an adjacent field. He held the binoculars up to his eyes. It had now come in even closer. And then they blacked out. The next thing they knew, they were back in the car. In fact, they were almost home with no memory of what had happened. As if only a moment had passed, they found themselves 35 miles down the highway with very little recall for what had happened. They expected to arrive home at 2. It was 5 o'clock when they arrived home, and there was physical evidence that something unusual had occurred. evidence that something unusual had occurred. The tops of Barney's best dress shoes were so deeply scraped that he had to buy new shoes. Betty's good dress that had been in fine condition when she'd put it on the previous morning was now torn in several locations.

Sightings of UFOs were widespread during this time, although very few people claimed to have contact with aliens. Betty was already a believer in UFOs, so was her sister. And I asked Kathleen if she remembers the day that her Aunt Betty called to tell them what happened. I absolutely do. It had a huge impact upon my life. I was 13 years old. I had returned home from school and Betty was on the phone with my mother and I overheard their conversation. contamination or possible contamination from this unidentified flying object that she and Barney had seen. Barney did not believe in UFOs, but after this incident, he felt massive anxiety and his ulcers were acting up. Betty was having nightmares, and, they were referred to a psychiatrist in Boston named Benjamin Simon. Dr. Simon specialized in hypnosis. He put each of them into a trance, but not together. He wanted to get their story separately. And this is real audio from Barney's first hypnosis. His memories pick up right after he blacked out.

Barney remembers seeing the craft land in front of them. And they're greeted by these humanoid figures with bulbous heads and large, slanted eyes. They're not gray or bald, like the classic image that we have of aliens today, but they look inhuman enough to terrify Barney. And then they lead him and Betty aboard the spacecraft. I try to maintain control so Betty cannot tell I am scared. God, I'm scared.

It's alright. You can go right on. Experience it. It will not hurt you now. I've got to get my gun. I've got to get my gun! Alright. That's alright. I've got to get my gut! All right. All right, that's all. I'm going to get my gut! Go this way, Steve. You got a gut now.

You forgot it now. You forgot it. It's calm now. Relax. Keep it relaxed. It's calm now. Relax. You can relax. I should mention here that hypnosis is very controversial. Some people swear by it, and they believe that hypnosis can unlock hidden memories. But there's evidence that hypnosis can also implant memories.

In fact, there are famous court cases about that issue. memories. In fact, there are famous court cases about that issue. But listening to the tape, I can't ignore the fact that Barney's terror feels real. And Dr. Simon agreed that there was something real about their experiences, but he didn't believe in aliens. In later interviews, he said that he thought something traumatic may have happened to the couple, but the alien imagery had come from Betty's dreams. Now, she claimed that she didn't tell Barney about her dreams, so Dr. Simon hypothesized that Barney must have overheard her talking about them to someone else. Now, of course, Barney's story had emerged from hypnosis. He did not remember anything. And when Betty went under hypnosis, her story was exactly

the same as Barney's, up until the point where they boarded the spacecraft. Although she says that Barney was so scared he closed his eyes, so he missed the most frightening part, when the aliens dropped them down to separate tables and performed medical experiments on them. and performed medical experiments on them. And the examiner has a long needle in his hand. And I see the needle. And it's the silliest needle I've ever seen. And I asked him what he's going to do with it.

And he said, just a simple test. It won't hurt me. And I asked him what. And he said he just wants to put it in my navel. It's just a simple test. I don't know. It won't hurt. Don't do it. Don't do it.

In case the audio was not clear enough, the aliens inserted a giant needle into Betty's navel. But after the aliens had finished their experiments, Betty felt strangely relaxed. She even had a conversation with one of them. even in a conversation with one of them. So I asked him where he, what, where was his home port? And he said, where's the, where are you on this map? And I looked and I laughed and I said, I don't know. So he said, well, then, if you don't know where you are, there wouldn't be any point of my telling you where I am.

I have to say, one of the reasons why I'm so fascinated by the story is that I'm from New England, and I have such a soft spot for those accents. I mean, in that clip, Betty sounds like she could be one of my aunts. And I love the fact that she asks the alien where his home port is, which is a phrase that I would normally associate with, like, a New England harbor town. Now, the hypnosis turned Barney into a believer. He and Betty were now on the same page, but they had no intention of going public. They did tell a few friends, and one of those friends told a reporter named John Luttrell.

Luttrell was a hard-nosed journalist. He usually covered crime for a newspaper which doesn't exist anymore called the Boston Traveler. You know, he was not a big believer in UFOs. But after hearing the story, he became obsessed with it. And the person who told him the story did not give him Betty or Barney's information. I mean, he used his journalistic detective skills to track them down. He said that he wanted to meet with them, and he promised if they would meet with him, he would not commercialize their story in any way. They refused to meet with him. They thought they would lose their jobs. They're very good standing in their community and in the state of New Hampshire. There was a lot to risk, and they did not want anyone except for a select group of individuals to know what had happened to them.

Unfortunately, it was carried to the public in five newspaper articles. Turns out he didn't need their cooperation to tell their story or their permission to publish their names. Well, I'm sure you've all had a peek at a very, very amazing and, I think, fantastic article. I found an old radio interview with John Luttrell, and I expected him to come across as an opportunist, but I was surprised how sincere he was. He said he was captivated by the story of the hills because it reminded him of the science fiction he used to love as a kid. Let us quickly go back to our own childhood. back to our own childhood. And we sat for hours in this little dream world that we created, reading Buck Rogers, reading Flash Gordon. And here, within the span of our own lifetime,

these things that were so far, far away have now achieved reality. Oh, I agree. So now nothing is impossible. Now, in this interview, he freely admits that the Hills did not want to talk to him. But he uses their fear of publicity as proof that they're credible witnesses. Frankly, they thought they would be laughed right out of their own communities. And this they couldn't afford to do. That's right. Mrs. Hill is a professional person, a person of great capability, a person described by her supervisor as one of the more talented, most dedicated women he's ever had, and a person whose emotional

stability is just unquestioned. You know, this woman is solid. Her husband, too. They had to be willing to gamble if people wouldn't laugh at them. Stephanie Kelly Romano is a professor at Bates College who studies UFO culture. And she says there's another reason why Betty and Barney Hill seem to be credible. They were an interracial couple in a time of segregation. And so they weren't necessarily the type of couple who was seeking attention, right? Barney talks over and over about the fact that when they were traveling, if places were not hospitable to interracial couples, he didn't ever want to

cause a scene. He didn't ever want to make a big deal out of anything. The idea that they would seek any type of publicity, I think, was easy for them to refute. So how did all of that publicity affect story had already been released, they should make their first public statement. And they did that in Dover, New Hampshire, at the Universalist Unitarian Church. And that went well. They thought maybe they could weather this thing. And then Barney's civil rights career took a major hit. Barney had been appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. This was a huge appointment politically for him, but he lost his position when it became public. Barney was so committed to his civil rights activities. It was something he didn't want to give up of as some UFO kook. And it bothered him terribly when people perceived

him in that light. Eventually, an author named John G. Fuller approached them. He was a believer, a UFO investigator, and he wanted to write a book about their experience with their full cooperation. He said, look, if you can't escape the story, you might as well own it. And they decided that made sense. They had nothing left to lose. The book was called The Interrupted Journey. And when it was published in 1966, it was even a bigger sensation than the newspaper articles. It was serialized in national magazines. They ended up on talk shows.

Barney even agreed to appear on a game show called To Tell the Truth, where he and two similar-looking men told the same story, and the contestants had to guess which was the real Barney Hill. Let's start the questioning with Arson Bean. Arson? Thank you. Well, whoever you are, I want you to know that I read every word of the story that was printed in the magazine about you, and I believe it.

It's impossible to disbelieve. Number one, what physical symptoms did you later notice? I'm referring to physical things that appeared on you. Warts. Warts. Yes. Eventually, the book was adapted into a TV movie starring James Earl Jones as Barney. How do I know this thing happened?

How do I know I wasn't just seeing things? Betty was played by Estelle Parsons. Did they have on a uniform or ordinary clothes? I couldn't say. I don't know. I can't remember. I'm not supposed to remember. I asked Kathleen if her aunt and uncle were surprised by how huge the book was. I asked Kathleen if her aunt and uncle were surprised by how huge the book was. I think they were very surprised, but they had committed to this without being fully aware of where it would lead, I think.

It would have been interesting to see how Barney handled his new public persona over the years. But tragically, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 46. Betty lived for many more decades, and she became a celebrity in the UFO community. Joseph Baker is a professor at East Tennessee University, and he studies support groups around paranormal experiences. He says what happened to Betty happens to a lot of people who go public about their encounters. Once you step out into the public like that, there's kind of no going back. You're forced to either disavow your own experience or to own up to it and try to, as best you can, in public, defend what has happened to you and explain what you believe

has occurred. But in the 1980s and 90s, Betty fell out of favor with the UFO community. What happened with Betty afterwards is that she started claiming lots of other experiences. Chris Bader is a professor at Chapman University. He and Joseph Baker co-authored a book called Paranormal America. He and Joseph Baker co-authored a book called Paranormal America. Originally, the idea of Betty and Barney Hill that was quite popular was that this was a couple that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if you had been there on that road at that time, it would have happened to you instead. But when Betty started claiming other experiences later in life, it made her more into someone who was supposed to be special, someone who the aliens specifically wanted to be in contact with. And for some people,

that led them to doubt her story, just to lead them to say, well, Betty is someone who either is just fantasy prone or wants to feel special. In the 1990s, Betty was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor. And that may have contributed to her visions of seeing UFOs everywhere. But by that point, she was socially isolated between believers and non-believers. She died in 2004 at the age of 85. She never remarried. And to the end, she kept telling people her stories,

especially what happened to her and Barney in September of 1961. And that is the story of Betty and Barney. But that's not the end of the story itself. The story they introduced to the world of humanoid aliens that abduct people out of the blue. That story was just beginning its journey through pop culture. There's a lot more after the break. As I looked into the reaction people had to Betty and Barney Hill, I kept wondering, why did this story become so huge? Why did it capture the public's imagination? To use a more contemporary phrase, why did it go viral?

Joseph Baker studies UFO support groups, and he says what he finds particularly interesting is that before the hills came along, the story of UFO encounters used to go very differently. So before this, the most popular form of alien contact narratives were one of two things. There were kind of the movie versions of invasions, but the one where people were actually, say, going aboard spaceships and having contact with aliens was what we would call contactee narratives, where people were claiming these positive experiences, where they were being enlightened, or they were having these encounters with extremely intelligent, advanced beings who were bringing them new information. In some cases, people were having positive sexual encounters with aliens.

And so those tended to be the narratives that, if they were out there, were around. The abduction against your will narrative was not there popularly until Betty and Barney's story. So that is what makes it different and new. It contains a lot of elements that are, frankly, in sort of the horror genre of narrative. Although Susan Lepselter thinks that story taps into a different genre. It really is a story about power in America. Susan is a professor at Indiana University. She wrote a paper about how the story of alien abductions, starting with the hills, bears a striking resemblance to the stories of Native Americans abducting white settlers on the frontier. That was a very common trope in westerns, dime novels, and movies.

And she doesn't think it's a coincidence that the story of the hills reminded people of that narrative at a time when they were beginning to doubt it. That kind of old dominant story of how the West was won, of, you know, the total triumph and the kind of unquestioned morality of what, you know, what we now see as a genocide, that master narrative starts to crumble kind of late in the 20th century, you know. And around the same time, a lot of people I was talking to in alien abduction worlds were saying things like, in order to make sense of it, they would say things like, well, this is just like when the Indians met the Spanish or the English for the first time. Those people from Europe came

over, they had superior technology, and the Indians didn't understand what was going on. And that's the same thing that's happening to us now. So they started to put themselves in the kind of empathic position of a native group who were being colonized from another world with greater technology. Simpson thinks it's also worth noting that Barney was a World War II veteran. And under hypnosis, he said that one of the aliens reminded him of a Nazi. It's not very long since images from the Holocaust have circulated. And those directly tap into scientific racism, of course, which is sort of what the aliens seem to be expressing in some way. So to have these aliens, one of whom looks like a Nazi, doing experimentation on human beings,

well, in that scenario, Betty and Barney stop being either black or white. They become human. But it seems like, to some extent, what you're saying is that there was almost a weird feel-good aspect of it. Like, yes, they're a biracial couple. They may have a lot of trouble, but under the microscope of these aliens, they were just people. Yeah. You know, like you and me. Yeah. That does seem to be kind of the effect of this. Stephanie Kelly Romano is a professor at Bates College who also studies UFO culture. And she thinks the story of the hills tapped into another kind of anxiety at the time. And it had to do with the test that the aliens performed on Betty, where they inserted a giant needle into her navel. It's the early 60s. And if we want to talk about reproductive freedoms and we want to talk about reproductive technology, and many of the scholars who write about Betty and Barney Hill and about the fact that for many authors, the reason for the extraterrestrial visitations is this vast program of hybridization and kind of this creation of this alien-human hybrid race.

It revolves around women's bodies, powerlessness, and reproduction. And so to think about these stories as the articulation of anxieties or fears or concerns over those issues makes sense to me. After the story of Betty and Barney Hill was spread far and wide, After the story of Betty and Barney Hill was spread far and wide, more and more people showing up to UFO support groups were claiming to have alien encounters that were very similar to theirs. And the details of the Hill story became standard, like the terrifying medical experiments, missing time, and lost memories that could be brought back through hypnosis. Even little details, like the fact that the aliens actually spoke into Barney's head without moving their mouths. Although Chris Bader thinks the images of the aliens themselves became like a game of telephone, whereas more and more people retold the story or claimed to have similar experiences, the aliens started to lose a lot of

the details to the point where they all became gray, hairless, and naked. And it's become an urban legend that Betty and Barney introduced the classic idea of the gray alien to pop culture. But the aliens that they saw had noses, hair, and they're wearing clothes. When they describe it, there are some discrepancies there from what we see today, including the fact that they were wearing baseball caps, all the creatures wearing black baseball caps. What you tend to find with all alien abduction narratives is that there tends to be this sort of standardized image that people coalesce around and things that don't

quite fit that image, like when someone sees an alien with a big nose or a lot of hair or a different color, that just tends to be sort of swept under the rug or forgotten. The perceived realism of the Hills story also inspired a lot of debunkers. Their entire sites dedicated to picking apart their story. And many of the debunkers have argued that Betty and Barney were influenced by specific episodes of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. Although Betty has said they never saw those episodes. Either way, the question of whether alien abduction stories are influenced by science fiction or vice versa is like the question of the chicken and the egg. And as alien abduction stories became more prevalent, you could see the influence of

Betty and Barney throughout science fiction, from Close Encounters to Independence Day. But the biggest pop culture phenomenon inspired by the Hills was the X-Files. Stephanie Kelly Romano was a huge fan of the X-Files. In fact, the show inspired her to academically study UFO groups. The X-Files really did kind of take that narrative and made it popular and kind of popularized the dominant themes, even including many of the things that were in Betty and Barney Hill. I mean, my favorite episode is Jose Chung's From Outer Space. Oh my gosh, me too.

So many tropes from Betty and Barney, and yet it's also all about this Rashomon, who do you believe? The unreliability of the narrators in that show really make it kind of this postmodern piece of genius television. The episode Jose Chung's From Outer Space is about a journalist who goes to a small town to write a book about a couple who claims they were abducted. The couple is not interracial, but otherwise it is all the same aspects of the hills, including missing time and hypnosis. Can you recall where you are? I'm in a room on a spaceship surrounded by aliens. The story is presented from so many different points of view. You don't know what's real and what's a fantasy that somebody believes is real.

And that's the point. The description of the aliens, the physical exam, the mind scan, the presence of another human being that appears switched off, it's all characteristic of a typical abduction. That's my problem with it, Mulder. It's all a little too typical. Abduction lore has become so prevalent in our society that you can ask someone to imagine what it would be like to be abducted and they'd concoct an identical scenario.

Yeah, if it were only one person, Scully, but we have two individuals here, each verifying the other story. Chris Bader actually agrees with Scully on this, although he thinks it was the X-Files itself that amplified this alien abduction narrative throughout pop culture. I try this experiment every semester now. I ask my students to go up to the board and draw an alien. And for the most part, there's always an exception or two, but I'm just absolutely astonished that not only can they draw a perfect gray on the board, they can also tell me exactly what a UFO abduction would be like. They can walk

me through the experience to the extent that if one of them was to express this experience to someone who's a UFO abduction researcher, it would sound authentic to them. But things are changing. I mean, these days, the abductee narrative has become such a cliche. The only time I see it on TV is the reoccurring Saturday Night Live sketch, where Cecily Strong plays a contactee and Kate McKinnon plays an abductee. And they're both talking to researchers, but the joke is that between the two of them, the abductee really got a raw deal, especially the way the aliens kept poking and prodding her body. I wonder if this was some sort of anatomical study? No, I don't think any of these guys were working on their master's thesis. And this summer, the biggest joke, the biggest online meme, was that all these people were supposedly going to storm Area 51 and demand to see aliens.

But that doesn't mean that people aren't taking UFOs seriously. With cell phone cameras and social media, videos of alleged UFOs are all over the place. And one of those videos became real news. The U.S. Navy has finally acknowledged that videos appearing to show UFOs flying through the air are real. They don't call them UFOs. They call them unidentified aerial phenomena. These several videos they're talking about were recorded years ago by fighter pilots. Then in 2017, they were made public by the New York Times. And scientists are looking further than ever into other galaxies to find planets that could support life.

And Susan Lepselter says all of these news stories are having an effect on our collective imagination, including science fiction. The way in which the fragility of the Earth itself and the sense of the possibility that the Earth is fragile, that we are perhaps in something we can't explain and in danger in some way seems to me to be very resonant at the moment. And we're seeing a lot of upsurge in UFO interest right now. And it seems to me this sort of desire to imagine that there is, you know, Planet B, so to speak, that seems to be

more what I'm hearing now, rather than these sorts of older abduction stories. So if the alien abductee narrative is fading away, at least in pop culture, not necessarily in UFO support groups, and a new narrative is starting to emerge, I asked Chris Bader, why should people know that it all started with this one couple, Barney and Betty Hill? It's important to know who the Hills are to understand that whatever paranormal experiences are, whatever UFO experiences are, they morph and change and grow. And Betty and Barney Hill are the beginning of a certain type of narrative

that's on its way out, and another one will replace it, and that narrative will grow and change. It's important to understand that whatever experience people are claiming, it is impacted by what they knew before, by their culture, by what they've seen in the media. That doesn't mean there's not a real experience there. Perhaps Betty and Barney Hill had a real experience that they interpreted and colored in frames of what they knew and what they'd seen before. What makes this story so poignant to me is that the people at the center got lost. And that's ironic because what made their story so frightening was their loss of control, their loss of dignity, and eventually the loss of their reputations. But to some extent, we could give it back to them with a new story about a couple that was

faithful to each other, faithful to their ideals, and faithful to their sense of the truth, whatever truth is out there. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Kathleen Martin, Chris Bader, Joseph Baker, Stephanie Kelly Romano, and Susan Lepzelter. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.