So Supernatural - ALIEN: The Abduction of Betty & Barney Hill

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

A weekend road trip ends bizarrely for a New Hampshire couple after they return home with a two-hour gap in their memories. Then the nightmares begin.  

Imagine you're in a psychiatrist's office with a doctor you trust. Your friend recommended them. There are diplomas all over their walls. You are completely at ease. You're here because you've been having strange dreams lately, and you want to unlock some memories that may be causing them. The process is slow, a little painstaking, but as the session goes on, details from that forgotten day slowly fall into place. Metal tables,

needles, lights, spines. It makes no sense. These memories can't possibly be real because if they were, you'd be the first human ever in the history of the world to have been abducted by aliens. This is Supernatural. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, I'm talking about Barney and Betty Hill, the so-called Adam and Eve of alien abductions. Theirs is the first ever widely reported, widely documented abduction case in the history of the United States, possibly the world. I'll have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. All those sci-fi movies and television shows you've seen, there's a good chance this story inspired them. It literally laid the foundation for the entire fictional genre.

But you guys, I think the original story might be real. There are people you expect to make up a bunch of wild stuff about how they were abducted by aliens. And then there's Betty and Barney Hill. In September 1961, the Hills had been happily married for about a year and three months. They live in a red-framed tenement house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire with their dog Delcy, the dachshund. And they're busy, like really busy. Betty's 42. She's a social worker handling upwards of a hundred different child welfare cases at a time. Barney's 39. He's a social worker handling upwards of 100 different child welfare cases at a time. Barney's 39. He's a World War II veteran who works nights at a post office 60 miles away in Boston.

He drives the hour plus there and back every time he goes in for a shift. He's also a former Boy Scout with excellent character references from his Army days and a reported IQ of 140, which is high. When they're not working, the Hills volunteer their time with their church and with the NAACP. You see, Barney's black, Betty's white. They're both active participants in the civil rights movement, which is in full swing in the 60s. So with all this going on, it's no wonder that they're both in need of a little break. September 15th is a Friday. Betty already has the week off starting next Monday, and when Barney gets home, he has a surprise for her.

He'd asked his managers if he could take some time off as well, and they said yes. So he's like, how about we take a weekend road trip? The summer's winding down, we deserve it, and it'll be the honeymoon we never had time for. And Betty is all in. Because of the spontaneous nature of their plans, they don't have time to go to the bank before it closes for the weekend. So they only have $70 in cash between them, which is fine. They're used to being frugal. They don't need to stay at a fancy motel or eat at expensive restaurants. They can borrow a cooler from a friend and take some food and still have a wonderful time. Betty spends Saturday getting everything ready. She puts their pistol in the trunk just in case they end up sleeping in the

car and need some protection. On Sunday morning, they hop in their blue and white Chevy Bel Air with Delcy the dog and start driving. The trip goes off without a hitch. They travel through Vermont. They see Niagara Falls and the Thousand Islands. They stop in Toronto. I mean, they're having a great time. By Tuesday, they're in Montreal, and the plan is to book a pet-friendly hotel before exploring the city's nightlife. But they get lost. This is long before GPS, but luckily someone gives Barney directions, but they give him in French. He tries his best to translate, but before they know it, they are way outside the city, so they decide to just keep heading east. As they drive,

an announcement comes over the radio. A tropical storm is about to hit the east coast. The storm's currently off the coast of Virginia with winds up to 130 miles per hour. Betty and Barney decide that they should probably head home before the storm hits. It's going to be a long drive, like four and a half hours, but they're prepared to go all the way through the night. Even though there's a storm approaching, it's a clear night. The moon's bright, the stars are out. They're driving the last leg of their trip along Route 3 through New Hampshire's White Mountains when Betty sees this tiny bright light moving erratically across the sky.

At first, she thinks it might be a shooting star, but when it doesn't disappear, she's like, maybe it's a satellite. That would be really exciting for Betty. This is just four years after the launch of Sputnik. Her father is a total space geek, and by association, she kind of is too. But then she notices the light isn't moving in a steady orbit. It's traveling up towards the moon. Betty tells Barney to pull over. She wants to get a better view with the binoculars they brought. So they're standing there taking turns with the binoculars, staring at this white light zigzagging across the stars. And then it starts getting bigger, like it's heading in their direction. As it moves into focus, Betty sees it's spinning.

Now, Barney's not as enthused as his wife. He offers up a list of possible explanations, including that the light could just be an airliner traveling to Canada. But Betty tells her husband he's being ridiculous. There's no way it could be a plane. It literally looks like it's following them. And she's right. When they get back in their car, the light seems to travel with them south down the highway. Barney's still not sure what it is.

He's not jumping to any conclusion, but he does get his gun out of the trunk just in case. Now keep in mind, it's the middle of the night. There's no one else on the road, and they're also in the middle of the wood, so there's no street lights. I'd be on edge if nothing weird was happening. And every time they stop the car and check the light, it is always right there, just in the distance. They make their way around a slight bend in the road and into this clearing. There aren't as many trees around and that's when they see it. Directly ahead of them, a bright, flat, circular disc hovering about a hundred feet above the ground. Barney slams his foot on the brakes and the car screeches to a grinding halt. He grabs

the binoculars and slowly, carefully cracks open the door to see if he can get a better look. As he does, the disc shoots above the tree line and just sits there, hovering. Barney's thinking to himself, this can't be real. He grabs his gun, puts it in his pocket, and steps outside. By his estimation, the disc is about 80 feet in diameter, and it's totally silent. It also has two rows of these big rectangular windows all around its rim. Now, if this were me, I'd be speeding away as fast as my car can go, but for some reasons that are beyond me, Barney decides to get closer to this thing. And as he does, he sees these two flaps open on each side of the disc. He peers through his binoculars,

and that's when he sees them. Yet them, as in at least half a dozen humanoid creatures looking down at him from the windows and moving around in this rigid, almost militaristic fashion. Then the craft starts descending again, right at him. Now is when Barney decides to hightail it out of there. He throws himself back into the car, shaking. He starts the engine, turns to his wife and tells her, if we don't get out of here soon, we are going to be captured by whatever's flying that thing. So the hills speed down the highway. The gas pedal is on the floor, but no matter how fast they go, they can't shake the craft. It's always right behind them. And before too long, it's above them, like directly over their car. Out of nowhere, they hear these rhythmic buzzing noises.

The sound's vibration penetrates the car until it eventually penetrates their bodies. The car is still moving, speeding, and the hills are sitting in complete silence. I mean, what are they going to say? They are scared out of their minds in survival mode. And then the buzzing stops. Soon, it comes back a second time, and everything starts to get a little bit hazy. But it's okay, because before Betty and Barney know it, they're crossing into Portsmouth, and they're almost home. By the time their Chevy pulls into the driveway, they're expecting it to

be 3am at the latest, but it's like 5am. The past two hours are a complete blur. The hills have vague memories of some sort of roadblock, a red-orange orb on the ground, and the intense desire to reach out and touch another human, but none of it makes any sense, and they can't remember literally anything else. When they stumble into their house and turn on the lights, they feel inexplicably drawn to stare out the window and up at the sky. After a few minutes, Barney breaks the silence. He finally acknowledges what they just went through and says to his wife, this is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me.

They spend the rest of the morning in a daze, not worried though. They feel at peace, like there's this magical blanket of calm over the house. But it's accompanied by an unmistakable feeling that they're still not alone. While Betty showers, Barney unpacks the car. She shouts for her husband to leave their belongings on the porch. It's probably best not to bring them inside right away. They could be tainted or even radioactive. In the coming days, with few exceptions, the Hills keep their close encounter to themselves. It becomes their bizarre little out-of-this-world secret, at least until their sense of calm fades away and the nightmares start. Coming up, the physical evidence and unlocked memories. Now back to the story. After their close encounter with a UFO, the Hills are of two minds when it comes to telling people about what happened.

Barney thinks they shouldn't. No one will believe them anyway, and they'll just look like liars. But Betty disagrees. She really wants to get the story off her chest, and she settles on telling her sister Janet. You see, a while back, Janet saw something strange in the sky herself. So even if she doesn't fully understand she won't judge. They speak sometime on Wednesday the day after the incident and the conversation goes well. Janet's super supportive. Betty and Barney also spend the morning debriefing about their encounter

basically checking in with each other making sure that what they remember actually happened. Barney suggests that they both try to sketch the flying disc in separate rooms to making sure that what they remember actually happened. Barney suggests that they both try to sketch the flying disc in separate rooms to make sure that they can't influence one another. When they finish and compare, the drawings are basically identical. So they're like, okay, we're not going crazy. Something happened. And that's when they start to notice all the physical evidence. On Wednesday night, out of curiosity, Betty goes to check on their car. She notices spots around the trunk, areas where the paint looks especially polished, and each one is about the size of a quarter and completely dry despite

the rainy weather. Then when she places a compass over them, the needles start acting haywire, spinning out of control. This really freaks Betty out. In her diary, she writes, I was standing there in the rain under the streetlight telling myself, don't scream, keep calm, everything is all right. She demonstrates this for Barney and Janet as well, and a few other close family members. Each time the compass passes over the spots, it reacts in the same way. And the car is not the only strange piece of evidence they find. The Hill's wristwatches mysteriously died that night. The shoes Barney wore have all these scuff marks and scrapes on them. The strap of the binoculars somehow broke. Betty's dress has a couple tears in it and some strange stains on the

hem, sleeve, and bodice. Even their dog, Delcy, suddenly has all sorts of health problems, and the Hills can't explain any of this. On Thursday, Janet convinces Betty to report everything they can remember to the local Air Force base, which is standard practice at the time. All unidentified flying object sightings get filtered through the military. Barney's still a little hesitant to tell anyone, but the Hills ultimately agree to give interviews. They answer questions and provide descriptions of the craft, and their report eventually gets entered into the files of a government program codenamed Project Blue Book. But there's almost no follow-up. However, Betty's unable to get what happened out of her mind, so she starts doing her own research on UFOs at the Portsmouth Public

Library. She's poring over any materials she can get her hands on, trying to make sense of it all. Ten days after the encounter, she starts having terrible nightmares. They're vivid and confusing. They combine some of her memories with flashes of events that can't possibly be real. And I'll discuss the specifics later, but for now, what you need to know is they last for five days straight before coming to an abrupt end. By November, it's been a month and Betty and Barney start taking weekend trips into the White Mountains. They're hoping that something will jog their memories. They're desperate to know what

happened in that two-hour gap, but answers are elusive. Now, I want to pause for a second. There's a certain narrative that we're used to with this kind of story. And even though Betty and Barney Hill created the mold, they actually break from it. I can tell you right now, they never in their lives try to write their own book about their experience. They don't approach any news outlets. They don't go around to a bunch of people talking about what happened. They tell a few close friends and family who later corroborate their claims. The Hills avoid the spotlight, report their encounter to all the appropriate channels,

and then they focus on themselves, on trying to understand. Whether that makes them credible or not, it's at least refreshing. For years after their encounter, the Hills live in complete obscurity. They try carrying on with their lives as best they can. They go back to work, they go back to volunteering within their community. Barney, in particular, wants to just forget. But moving on is easier said than done. Neither Betty or Barney have felt the same since that night. Their anxiety has only gotten worse. Betty can't focus, Barney can't sleep, and his health has been in decline.

He's developed high blood pressure, ulcers, and these strange warts around his groin that doctors say need to be surgically removed. At the end of the day, the reality is they know it's not normal for two regular people to just suddenly have a bout of amnesia at the exact same time for the exact same length of time. So on Saturday, December 14th, 1964, the Hills find themselves in the office of a Boston psychiatrist named Dr. Benjamin Simon. He comes highly recommended through a friend of theirs who knows about their encounter. He's an expert in therapeutic hypnosis

and the former chief of neuropsychiatry at a hospital in Long Island. Most of his patients are World War II veterans with a broad range of psychiatric disorders, but he's happy to help the Hills dispel their UFO fears. As you might expect from someone in his field, Dr. Simon is a skeptic. He doesn't buy into the UFO mania that's been sweeping the nation.

He assumes there's a more rational explanation for the Hills' troubles. Before diving into treatment, Dr. Simon lays all his cards on the table. He basically tells the Hills, hypnosis is a slow process and it's not even guaranteed to fix anything. There's a fine line between memory, dreams, and hallucinations.

So you have to understand it doesn't always uncover objective truths. By the end of their first consultation, everyone's on the same page. Dr. Simon starts individual one-on-one sessions with the Hills, in separate rooms, to ensure the results are as honest as possible. But before diving into hypnosis, Dr. Simon and Betty discuss her old nightmares. She wrote them all down in her diary back in November 1961 and pieced them into a timeline that seemed to make sense. And here's what she put together. In her dreams, everything's basically the same as what she remembers from that night.

She's in the Chevy, sitting right beside Barney, and Delcy's there. Then, out of nowhere, they're surrounded by space people. Rather than call them aliens, Betty uses the term like astronauts from another solar system. They have human features. They're bipedal, like five foot four inches tall, with dark cat-like eyes, gray skin, and bluish lips. They're dressed in these blue-gray uniforms, like what you might expect a military officer to wear on Earth. One of them, the one she assumes is the leader,

speaks English, but not very well. Betty and Barney cooperate as they're taken into a clearing in the woods and aboard the spacecraft. They're placed on these metallic operating tables and separated. Betty has no idea what's happening to Barney, but in her room, the aliens start running medical tests on her. They remove her dress, take nail clippings, scrape skin samples, plug hairs, and even collect earwax. One of the aliens inserts this huge six-inch needle straight into Betty's navel. They tell her it's a pregnancy test, but even in the dream, it hurts. Searing pain shoots through her body until one of the aliens waves a hand in front of her face, and the pain instantly disappears.

After this, the interactions between Betty and her abductors are almost friendly. At some point, the aliens operating on Barney in another room run into Betty's room, worried. They're concerned that they removed Barney's teeth, not realizing that they're actually holding his dentures. Betty laughs and tries to tell them that they're not real. It's a sign of aging, but they don't understand. When the exams are over, Betty finds a book lying around, written in a language she doesn't understand. She asks if she can take it as a souvenir, proof that this really happened, and the leader says yes, but it's later overruled by the others. Then, and this is important, Betty and the alien get into a conversation about where

they're from. The leader pulls out a map of all these stars connected by lines. Betty asks if they can point out where Earth's sun is in relation to their home, but they put it away without answering. The aliens tell Betty she won't remember anything when she wakes up. And that's it. That's the rundown of Betty's five nightmares pieced together. Pretty wild, right? Dr. Simon sure thinks so when he hears all this. Early on in his time with the Hills, he diagnoses them with a general anxiety syndrome. He believes that's what most likely caused Betty's nightmares and their memory lapse. But in the end, Dr. Simon changes his mind.

See, when Betty undergoes hypnosis, it feels like deja vu. Like Betty is walking Dr. Simon through her dreams again, almost step by step. Minimal details change, and they're mostly surface things. Like the moment their car becomes surrounded by aliens. Betty's dream gave the impression that they cooperated but under hypnosis she describes

struggling against their captors. It's not until one of the aliens touches Betty's arms that she becomes powerless to resist. She also says that she had to fight her body's urge to fall asleep. The temperature inside the craft was cooler than the night air outside. And under hypnosis, she says she spent the majority of her time on board with her eyes shut, pretty scared. That feeling does go away by the end of it, but tears stream down Betty's face as she describes the different medical tests the aliens conducted. With all this, the dreams really start to seem like memories, especially once you compare Betty's account to Barney's. Remember, Dr. Simon is conducting these hypnosis interviews entirely independently of each other.

Betty and Barney don't find out what's being said in the other session until much later. And yet, their memories completely line up almost to a T. Under hypnosis, Barney describes the initial struggle, feeling terrified then numb, the wave of calm that eventually takes over, even having his eyes closed for a lot of it. Oh, and he also mentions that he hit his shoe on something as he entered the craft. And of course, he provides insight into what happened in his operation room. Like Betty, he's placed on a metal table, but it's way too short for him. His feet hang off the end. As for medical tests, he describes a relatively painless rectal

exam and how the aliens paid a lot of attention to his spine. He definitely remembers they opened his mouth at one point. So maybe that's when they took out his dentures. But more than anything, he insists that they placed some sort of substance against his genitals and maybe took a sperm sample. You can find recordings of some of these sessions online. More than the content, it's the emotion of the Hills' testimony that sticks with me. I mean, they sound wracked with anxiety and fear. At one point, Barney even screams, saying,

I'm not going to say it. I don't believe flying saucers are real. It's because he doesn't want to believe. But when Dr. Simon suggests it might have all been a dream, Barney, still hypnotized, shouts, no, I did not dream this. After all is said and done, after six months of interviews, Dr. Simon is unwilling to say for sure whether or not the Hills were abducted by aliens. But he's certain of one thing. They're not lying. Coming up, Barney and Betty's story shakes the world. Now, back to the story.

While Betty's under hypnosis, Dr. Simon asks her to recreate the star map her alien captors allegedly showed her. It was supposed to be the depiction of their home solar system, although the aliens wouldn't tell her where it was supposed to be the depiction of their home solar system, although the aliens wouldn't tell her where it was in relation to Earth. But two years later, amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish gets her hands on Betty's map. She wonders whether it correlates to any actual known celestial patterns. Turns out, it does. After comparing it to all sorts of different star

charts from different vantage points, she finds a real star system that perfectly aligns with what Betty's drawn. It's called Zeta Reticuli. And just like that, Marjorie's convinced she's found the alien's home. Word of the discovery travels fast. Astronomy Magazine runs a feature on what the editors call the Zeta Reticuli incident. It's major news. Especially because by the time Marjorie is studying Betty's map, the hills are already famous.

In 1965, a Boston journalist somehow got their hands on Dr. Simon's hypnosis transcripts and published a series of articles. But the initial reporting apparently gets so much wrong, Betty and Barney feel that they have to go public with the truth. And when they do, their story really catches fire. Newspapers around the world are talking about the Hills. They're being invited to speak at UFO conferences. One year after the story breaks, their encounter is written into a book, The Interrupted Journey, by author John G. Fuller.

In time, there are more books, followed by television shows and made-for-TV movies. The Hills become a pop culture phenomenon, and their stories become fodder for other claims. The number of alien abduction reports in the United States increases by 2,500%. Obviously, that's a number that invites some skepticism. Could the rate of abductions really spike that much in such a short time? More likely than not, a good portion of those reports were fabricated. People who saw the attention that the Hills received and tried to follow in their footsteps. This is what I meant when I said Betty and Barney literally laid the foundation for how we understand alien abductions today.

I mean, think about all the abduction stories you've ever heard. They probably sound a lot like the Hills'. Questionably hostile, bright lights, exam rooms, intrusive medical procedures, needles, and the whole encounter is characterized by memory problems. The Hills also shape how we picture aliens. Big, black, cat-like eyes that slightly wrap around the sides of their head. Slits for nostrils, no ears, two arms, two legs. Somewhere along the line they got a little greener, apart from that the iconic image hasn't changed that much we even have a shorthand for the hills's archetypal extraterrestrial now we call

them the grays but here's what i find so fascinating about all of this betty hill was skeptical of the reports that followed hers she later went on to tell a reporter, if you were to believe all the claims, it would figure out to 3,000 to 5,000 abductions in the United States alone every night, there wouldn't be room for planes to fly. Unfortunately, Barney had less time to register his opinions. He died from a stroke in 1969, only three years after John Fuller published his book. But while he was alive, he never wavered from his belief that everything Dr. Simon uncovered in their six months together happened. They weren't hallucinations. It was all real. And he takes that belief to his grave. When Dr. Simon published his thoughts,

he wrote that there were only two possibilities for what could have happened that night. Either the abduction actually happened, or, quote, In other words, something real did happen, he just can't be sure that it was an alien abduction. After an hours-long interview with the Hills, Pulitzer Prize-winning astronomer Carl Sagan

came to the same conclusion. He didn't believe they were abducted, but he believed their sincerity. He found them to be genuine, honest people, which of course leaves us with one question. What event could the Hills have possibly mistaken for an alien abduction? Dr. Simon didn't propose any specific answer, but he pointed to a few different physical underlying factors that may have caused the Hills to misinterpret reality, including exhaustion,

sleep deprivation, and stress. This could mean stress from their work, but more likely stress from being an interracial couple at a time when some U.S. states still banned interracial marriage. In his sessions, Barney spent a considerable amount of time explaining the emotional toll of being Black in white spaces. Maybe the Hills lived through a different traumatic experience that night, one that later developed into a shared dream as a coping mechanism of some sort. After all, one element of their story has been debunked, Marjorie Fish's star map. It turns out she actually fudged some of the details to make the connection work. But that has no bearing

on whether the Hills were telling the truth. Betty never claimed that she'd found the alien's home. For years, the Hills just answered people's questions as honestly as possible. And for me, there are enough legitimately weird coincidences for me to consider the possibility that this actually happened. I didn't even have time to include everything, like the stains on Betty's dress. They eventually went in for testing and no one could identify the substance that caused them. But rather than tug at every last loose thread, I want to just leave you with this. If the Hills

truly believed every word they said, why are we so hesitant to believe them? Thanks for listening. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.