Mysteries Uncovered: True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained

More than half a century ago, Barney and Betty Hill were driving through New Hampshire’s White Mountains when they claimed that they were abducted by extraterrestrials. Their story attracted national attention and has inspired movies, TV shows, and best-selling books. The state of New Hampshire has even marked the spot where the alleged abduction took place. Despite decades of investigation, speculation, and controversy, the alleged alien abduction of Barney and Betty Hill still defies logical explanation.

Barney and Betty’s otherworldly adventure began on September 19, 1961. The couple was driving in their 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air from Niagara Falls, where they had been enjoying a short vacation, to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Barney, 38, and Betty, 41, had only married in May the preceding year, and their trip was something of a belated honeymoon. Both had been married before.

It was a warm fall evening, the sky was clear, and the moon was almost full. At around 10pm, they were driving along the desolate, two-lane Route 3 near Lancaster, New Hampshire, when Betty spotted a bright light in the sky. She assumed that the object was a shooting star, while Barney said it was probably just an off-course satellite. “When I looked at it first, it didn’t seem anything particularly unusual, except that we were fortunate enough to see a satellite,” recollected Betty. “It had no doubt gone off its course and it seemed to be going along the curvature of the earth. It looked like a star, in motion.” However, Betty soon noticed that the bright object appeared to be following them, disappearing and then reappearing behind trees or a mountaintop, as they passed through Franconia Notch State Park.

The couple’s dachshund, Delsey, was becoming agitated, so the couple decided to pull over and let her relieve herself while they took a short walk to stretch their legs. The object was still visible in the sky and Barney suggested that it could be a plane, possibly a Piper Cub. However, it appeared to now be moving erratically and unpredictably. Barney suggested that the pilot could be having fun with them. Betty, however, wasn’t convinced. She was adamant that the object was a UFO and that it was following them. They climbed back into their car and continued on their route. Betty continued to insist that the object was a UFO, while Barney dismissed her assertion. Betty’s family had once claimed to have seen a UFO in Kingston, New Hampshire. Betty had believed them, but Barney was skeptical; he did not believe UFOs existed.

Continuing on their way, Barney and Betty rounded a curve near the Indian Head rock formation. Hovering around 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30m) above them was a large, circular, flat disc. “Barney, stop the car and look!” shouted Betty. “You’ve never seen anything like this in your life.” Barney slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a halt in the middle of the road. He grabbed his binoculars to get a closer look at the object. He would later recall that, by this point, he was starting to feel afraid. He had no idea what the thing could be; unlike a plane or helicopter, it was totally silent.

Despite his fear, Barney felt an overpowering impulse to get closer to the object. He later recounted that the hovering disc was around 60 to 80 feet (18 to 24m) in diameter with V-shaped wings with red lights on the tips. Across the front of the object was a double row of rectangular windows. Staring through his binoculars, he saw up to a dozen humanoid figures staring through the windows at him and Betty. The disc slowly began to descend. Barney rushed back to the car. Trembling with fear, he exclaimed to Betty that they needed to get out of there or they were going to be “captured.”¹¹

Barney and Betty accelerated down the highway. The UFO followed and swooped down directly above them. A strange buzzing and beeping sound began to emanate from the disc and appeared to bounce off the trunk of the Hills’ car. An odd tingling feeling passed through their bodies. “What’s that? What’s happening?” cried Betty. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know what it is,” replied Barney.¹¹

What happened next is shrouded in mystery. The next thing they knew they were 35 miles (56km) south of Indian Head with no idea how they had gotten there.

On returning home, Betty and Barney were puzzled to discover that Betty’s dress was torn and stained with a pink substance, and Barney’s shoes were scuffed and his pants stained. Furthermore, both their watches had stopped and neither of them had any memory of two hours of the drive.

On their car, they noticed several shiny spots. When, the following day, a compass was placed on one of them, its needle spun wildly, as if the normal magnetic field had been disrupted in some way.

The following day, Betty placed a call to the 100^th Bomb Wing at Pease Air Force Base in Newington, New Hampshire, to report a UFO sighting. Both she and Barney described the object that they had seen in the sky. Barney omitted a mention of the humanoid figures he had spotted in the craft’s windows because he feared ridicule. Later that day, Major Paul W. Henderson phoned the Hills and questioned them about what they had seen. Betty wrote in her diary, “Major Henderson asked to speak with Barney, who was hesitating about talking on the phone. But, once he was on the phone, he was giving more information than I had. Later, Barney said he had done this, for Major Henderson did not seem to express any surprise or disbelief.” Major Henderson reported the Hills’ experience to the United States Air Force Project Blue Book, a government initiative set up in 1952 to study UFO sightings and decide whether they were a threat to US security: “On the night of 19–20 Sept. between 20/0001 and 20/0100 Mr. and Mrs. Hill were traveling south on Route 3 near Lincoln, New Hampshire, when they observed, through the windshield of their car, a strange object in the sky. They noticed it because of its shape and the intensity of its lighting as compared to the stars in the sky. The weather and the sky were clear at the time.” Although the strange incident had taken place in the rural and desolate mountains of northern New Hampshire, Project Blue Book concluded that the object had the characteristics of an advertising searchlight.

In October 1961, Betty and Barney were interviewed by Walter N. Webb, a lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium in Boston. Webb was also a scientific advisor to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), and he occasionally investigated UFO reports from the New England area. Initially he was skeptical about interviewing the couple owing to the fact that Barney had reportedly seen movement inside the UFO and Webb typically disregarded such claims as fiction. Nevertheless, he sat down with the couple and questioned them both separately and together, fully expecting to be able to poke holes in their story. The interviews extended through lunch and into the evening. “I tried to make them slip up somewhere, and I couldn’t; I simply couldn’t. Theirs was an ironclad story,” he said. Webb prepared his report for NICAP, concluding that “they were telling the truth, and the incident occurred exactly as reported except for some minor uncertainties and technicalities that must be tolerated in any such observation where human judgment is involved (i.e., exact time and length of visibility, apparent sizes of objects and occupants, distance and height of object etc.).”

In the following weeks and months, Betty and Barney suffered from nightmares, increasing anxiety, and irrational fears. Barney also experienced stress-induced health issues, including mysterious wartlike growths on his groin, high blood pressure, and an ulcer. Three years after their ordeal, they sought the help of Dr. Benjamin Simon, a distinguished psychologist and neurologist.

During World War II, Dr. Simon had been Chief of Neuropsychiatry and Executive Officer at Mason General Hospital, Washington, where he had successfully used hypnosis to treat psychiatric disorders among military personnel.²² In particular, he used hypnosis to unlock what he called cases of “double amnesia,” caused by traumatic experiences. Dr. Simon separately placed Betty and Barney under hypnosis, encouraging them to relive the events of the “missing” two hours, which had apparently been repressed by their conscious minds.

First, Barney was taken back to that evening in September. He slowly recalled climbing out of the car with his binoculars, determined to prove that Betty’s UFO assertion was wrong. By this point, he had become annoyed by Betty’s stubbornness over the nature of the object: “I say to myself: I believe Betty is trying to make me think this is a flying saucer . . .”²² Looking through his binoculars, Barney expected to see a satellite, or possibly a hovering helicopter. When he focused on the bright object in the sky, what he actually saw was a pancake-shaped object with “rows of windows” and “one huge light.” He remembered feeling scared and wanting the object to just go away. He then spotted eight to ten humanoid figures that he described as “somehow not human” looking out of the windows. Their arms were going up and down as if they were controlling levers. “What do they want?” he wondered.

Barney recalled one of the aliens in particular. Dr. Simon asked him whether this alien reminded him of anyone. Barney replied, “I think of a redheaded Irishman. I don’t know why. I think I know why. Because Irish are usually hostile to Negroes [which was how he identified].” However, this alien appeared to be friendly, and even had a large grin on its round face. The aliens were wearing black leather outfits that reminded Barney of black-clad Nazi officers. All of a sudden, Barney was overcome with the fear that they were planning to abduct him and his wife. “I gotta get my gun! I’ll shoot it down!” Barney, suddenly panic-stricken, shouted at Dr. Simon.

Barney then told Dr. Simon that he remembered being unaware of where Betty was at this time. Then he felt the leader of the aliens telepathically urging him to “stay there and just keep looking.” According to Barney, the aliens’ leader looked evil and had haunting, slanted eyes. Barney felt as though he was in a trance and couldn’t move. He remembered pleading with God to give him the power to flee back to his car. Somehow he managed to do so, and he and Betty attempted to escape. By this point in the hypnosis session, Barney was completely hysterical. He had begged Dr. Simon to wake him up twice already, but the doctor had refused: When a patient asks to be awoken, it is typically because they are about to experience a painful event, one so painful that they do not want to face it again, even while in a trance. Dr. Simon believed that his tough stance would ultimately help Barney face—and deal with—whatever had traumatized him.

Barney next recalled that a group of aliens appeared before them on the road and helped him out of his car. He was so overcome with panic and fear that he could not open his eyes. He remembered being taken up a slight incline. Describing the aliens, he said, “They were by my side, and I had a funny feeling because I knew they were holding me, but I couldn’t feel them . . . I felt floating, suspended.” He recollected lying on something or being “inside something,” but wasn’t sure what because he did not want to open his eyes. When he eventually did so, he told Dr. Simon that he appeared to be in a hospital operating room that was colored pale blue. As he lay on a table, he felt as though somebody was putting a cup around his groin and he felt a tug or pressure. In a later hypnosis session, Barney suggested that the aliens were taking a sperm sample from him.

When Dr. Simon placed Betty under hypnosis, her account of being abducted eerily matched Barney’s story. She recalled how, after they attempted to flee from the UFO, they came across “men standing in the highway.” She described how these men approached the car in two groups; by this point, she had been overcome by a “kind of daze.” One group led her from the car, while the other took Barney. “Don’t be afraid. We’re not going to harm you,” one of the men said to Betty. She said that the men took them inside the UFO. She described walking up a long corridor and into a room, while Barney was taken into another room. “Another man comes in . . . I think he’s a doctor . . . They push up the sleeve of my dress and they look at my arm . . . and then they turn my arm over, and they look at the underside . . . And they rub, they have a machine . . . it’s something like a microscope, only a microscope with a big lens,” said Betty. She described how they scraped her skin with something that looked similar to a letter opener and then placed the scrapings onto a piece of plastic.

Betty also remembered that they took swabs from inside her mouth and plucked out several strands of her hair. One of the men then felt around her neck, behind her ears, under her chin, and around her collarbone, and then examined her feet. Another man cut off a piece of her fingernail and then ordered her to take off her dress. She complied and was then placed on a table and poked and prodded with a number of needles. “It doesn’t hurt at all,” she told Dr. Simon. Next, Betty remembered them putting a needle into her navel and informing her that it was a pregnancy test. Betty told the doctor that when Barney was led out of the room where he had been examined, his eyes were closed. Toward the end of her hypnosis session, Betty recalled staying behind and arguing with the aliens’ leader because she wanted to take a souvenir so that people would believe her. “I do wish I could have some proof of this, because it is the most unbelievable thing that ever happened,” said Betty. While this was going on, a group of aliens took Barney and put him back in the car. During his hypnosis session, Barney had recalled that he was returned to the car before Betty. They also both remembered that, after getting back in the car, Betty asked, “Well, do you believe in flying saucers now?”

Initially Betty and Barney decided against going public with their story, fearing widespread ridicule. They worried that they would lose their jobs and status in their community. Up until now, the couple had enjoyed a simple, quiet life. Betty, who had graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1958, was a social worker, and Barney was employed by the US Postal Service. They were an interracial couple—unusual at this time—and were politically active, involved in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and various literacy programs. Barney had been appointed to serve as an advisor to the US Commission on Civil Rights. The couple’s niece, Kathleen Marden, recalled, “I think it was difficult for Barney in some ways; he was afraid that they would become laughingstocks. He thought it would take away from the work they were trying to do.”³³

Betty and Barney were forced to go public in 1965 when a family friend leaked their story to a reporter for the now-defunct Boston Evening Traveller. The Hills’ story was featured on the newspaper’s front page in October 1965 and numerous other news outlets subsequently picked up the story, which soon began appearing in publications all over the world. The following year, the Hills’ account was turned into a book by John G. Miller titled The Interrupted Journey, and in 1975 it was adapted as a TV movie, The UFO Incident, starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons.

Betty and Barney’s story is widely considered to be the very first documented and legitimate case of alien abduction. Skeptics and believers remain divided on what Betty and Barney Hill saw that night. The doubters maintain that Betty and Barney simply saw a starlike light that appeared to be following them. Out of fear, they turned off the main highway and traveled through narrow mountain roads, losing track of time.

One of the biggest skeptics was Dr. Benjamin Simon himself, whose sessions probing the couple’s subconscious minds had yielded such remarkable results. In 1975, Dr. Simon commented on Boston’s WBZ radio’s Larry Glick Show that the Hills’ abduction claims were never truly about aliens or abduction, but instead were more about a black man’s fears and a white woman’s dreams. In the interview, he told listeners that hypnosis had revealed the “marked anxiety Barney had of being a black man in a white culture.”⁴⁴ He explained that Barney, who had been married before, felt tremendous guilt for leaving his first marriage and deeply missed his sons. Simon went on to describe how marrying a white woman in the early 1960s—an era when interracial marriage was still illegal in some US states—had only added to his deep-seated psychological problems. According to Dr. Simon, Barney was a nervous wreck and whatever he saw that night had been intensified by his already existing “feeling of anxiety, feeling of being watched, feeling of danger.” He suggested that it was Betty who believed in UFOs and that her subsequent nightmares had fueled the dreamlike narrative of their abduction story. In short, Dr. Simon suggested that the entire alien abduction story was simply the product of Betty’s imagination.

Immediately following the couple’s UFO encounter in 1961, Betty started to write down the nightmares that she had been having about being abducted by aliens. According to Dr. Simon, the nightmares Betty detailed in her dream journal matched Betty and Barney’s accounts while under hypnosis. When presented with this information, Betty was adamant that she had never shared her nightmares with Barney, but admitted that she had told others about them when Barney was nearby, possibly close enough to overhear her. During one of the hypnosis sessions, Dr. Simon suggested this to Barney, but he was adamant that his memories of the abduction had not stemmed from Betty’s nightmares. “No. She never told me that. I was lying on the table, and I felt them examining me,” he insisted. “I am telling you what actually happened. At the time Betty was telling about her dream, I was very puzzled, because I never knew this happened . . .”

The Pulitzer Prize–winning astronomer Carl Sagan was among the Hills’ debunkers, but nevertheless he still considered their claims to be noteworthy. He described their experience as “the first alien abduction story in the modern genre” and observed that it was the template for countless ensuing accounts of alien abductions. Sagan also speculated that the alien abduction claims from Betty and Barney had been a shared dream. Betty and Barney tried to sue Sagan, when “Encyclopedia Galactica,” episode 12 of his Cosmos TV show (broadcast December 14, 1980), cast their abduction in an unfavorable light. However, since Betty and Barney claimed that their story was fact as opposed to fiction, they couldn’t trademark it.

For believers, however, there is one particular portion of the Hills’ hypnosis sessions that gives an air of legitimacy to their claims. While hypnotized, Betty recalled that, before being returned to her car, she had asked one of the aliens where they had come from. She claimed that the alien told her that she would not recognize the area if he were to show her on a star chart, and that even if he did show her, she wouldn’t remember. Betty insisted that she would and the alien showed Betty a constellation that he could see from his home planet. He pointed out heavy lines, which he had marked as trade routes, and broken lines, which he had marked as tracing various space expeditions. In 1964, Betty recreated the configuration of stars that the alien had shown her. At the time, astronomers were unable to identify the constellation. However, in 1969, the constellation that Betty sketched all those years ago was identified by amateur astronomer and UFO researcher Marjorie Fish as Zeta Reticuli.⁵⁵ Her opinion was given some weight by an article in the December 1974 edition of Astronomy magazine. It was not until the early 1990s that science, in the form of data from the European Hipparcos satellite that accurately measured hundreds of thousands of stars’ distances from the Sun, disproved Marjorie Fish’s interpretation of Betty Hill’s star chart.

The Hills’ niece, Kathleen Marden, 13 years old at the time of the abduction, was skeptical of the Hills’ claims until, much later, she analyzed tape recordings of the couple’s hypnosis sessions. “Barney’s description, though told from his own perspective, was nearly identical to Betty’s,” she said. “Each independently told Dr. Simon that the men split into two groups of three and approached each side of the vehicle.”

Marden spent 15 years investigating the Hills’ accounts, and in 2007 she and coauthor Stanton T. Friedman published the book Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. During her investigations, Marden found that scientific analysis of the dress that Betty was wearing on the night of the alleged abduction revealed an anomalous biological substance. The dress had also sustained extensive damage to the zipper, hem, and lining that could not be explained. “I attempt to set the record straight. So much skepticism is based upon inaccurate information. I’m skeptical until I see evidence. So I think that it’s a matter of informing people about the truth,” said Marden.⁶⁶ She concluded that Betty and Barney had been abducted that night and that the event had been covered up by the US Air Force and other government agencies. She pointed to the fact that Project Blue Book had quickly dismissed what Betty and Barney had seen that night by suggesting that the UFO was an advertising searchlight. “It made no sense whatsoever, but that’s what the Air Force wanted people to think,” Marden commented in 2017.⁷⁷

Marden also attempted to explain Barney’s descriptions of the aliens themselves. When the statements he made under hypnosis were made public, many people suggested that Barney had simply been observing humans, possibly even military personnel. She asked the reader to remember that Dr. Simon had told Barney to express all of his innermost thoughts and emotions. When he described feeling threatened by the alien who reminded him of an Irishman, he was taken back to experiencing racial prejudice at the hands of the Irish. When he described the leader of the aliens as looking like a Nazi, he was taken back to World War II, when he was serving in the Army.

After reluctantly going public with their story, Betty and Barney became staunch advocates of creating a legitimate outlet for people to discuss UFOs and alien abductions without fear of being mocked. Throughout the 1960s, they appeared on national talk shows, and Barney continued to wonder whether what he claimed he had seen during hypnosis was real or just a figment of his imagination. In 1967, they were confronted on television by a panel of esteemed scientists, including Carl Sagan. Barney was bluntly asked what exactly happened that night. “Ask Betty first,” Barney replied, to which Betty responded, “I believe we were really captured.”

Barney passed away suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1969 aged just 46. Betty, the more gregarious of the couple, became a celebrity on the UFO circuit and became known as the “First Lady of UFOs” and the “Grandmother of All Abductions.” She traveled extensively and gave lectures on UFOs and extraterrestrials, before retiring in her 70s, complaining that the quest for knowledge about aliens had become tainted by commercialism. Since the Hills’ experience, abduction claims had proliferated, and Betty claimed that people were making up false stories. “If you were to believe the numbers of people who are claiming [to have been abducted], it would figure out to [be] 3,000 to 5,000 abductions in the United States alone every night. There wouldn’t be room for planes to fly.”⁸⁸ She also lambasted the media, stating that they were perpetuating UFO fiction. In a 1997 interview with the Associated Press, she commented, “The media presented them [UFOs] as huge craft, all brightly lighted and flashing, but they are not. They are small, with dim lights, and many times they fly with no lights.” Tom Elliot, the founder of Boston Paranormal Investigators, commented: “She felt her story was the only legitimate one.”⁹⁹

After a battle with lung cancer, Betty Hill passed away in 2004 at the age of 85. In 2011, a historical marker was erected by the state of New Hampshire at the Indian Head resort to commemorate the Betty and Barney Hill UFO encounter. It reads, “On the night of September 19–20, 1961, Portsmouth, N.H., couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two hours of ‘lost’ time while driving south on Rte. 3 near Lincoln. They filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report of a brightly lit cigar-shaped craft the next day, but were not public with their story until it was leaked in the Boston Traveller in 1965. This was the first widely reported UFO abduction report in the United States.”¹⁰¹⁰

Betty and Barney Hill’s alleged encounter with extraterrestrials changed their lives and, as the very first credible report of an alien abduction, UFO history. While many doubted—and still doubt—their claims, the Hills were adamant about what they had seen that night. “Don’t be afraid,” Betty once reassured the readership of the Los Angeles Times. “They don’t hurt anybody. If they wanted to conquer us, they would.”¹¹¹¹

The Abduction of Barney and Betty Hill