Seacoast History Blog #43
April 18, 2009 

Forty years after the death of Barney Hill, I finally heard him speak. He was hypnotized, his voice halting and breathy, but masculine and clear. He was talking about his close encounter with aliens in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He sounded fearful and confused, struggling to believe his own eyes as he re-imagined that fateful night in the fall of 1961. (Continued below)

UNH Exhibits Hill UFO & Civil Rights Colleciton　

Kathleen Marden played brief clips of the famous hypnosis tapes recorded in the Boston office of psychologist Benjamin Simon a couple of years after the encounter. The Hills turned to him for help in sorting out their troubling UFO experience. Journalist John Fuller used the tapes to dramatize his book about the event.

Kathy is the niece of Betty and Barney Hill, the most famous alleged alien abductees in the world. Their story, released in 1965, still resonates in science fiction stories to this day. Any tale of gray almond-eyed aliens performing medical experiments on humans aboard a flying saucer is descended from the Hills story. It was featured in Look magazine, in a book, and in a TV movie.

MORE ON THE HILLS

I never met Barney Hill. He died suddenly in 1969, and after reading about him for years, the sound of his voice was chilling.

"I felt myself being told to come closer," Barney said. "I was told to keep the binoculars up…and no harm would come to me."

Barney wanted to reach for a gun he was carrying, he told the therapist under hypnosis, but was compelled, he implied, not to do so. He continued to look at the gray humanoid figures in the space ship through binoculars as they manipulated a control panel. They were wearing military caps and shiny outfits, he said.

Kathy played the tapes in a conference room at the Memorial Union Building at the University of New Hampshire. She spoke for an hour, detailing the familiar steps of the Hills’ alleged encounter with aliens. Kathy first overheard the story when she was 13 years old. Her mother was the first person Betty called immediately after the event. Kathy has investigated the story from every angle, detailing it in her book "Captured". Her presentation is methodical, practiced and convincing.

I remain, however, unconvinced. I was not convinced by John Fuller’s book "The Interrupted Journey" nor when Betty Hill told me the story half a dozen times in her living room in Portsmouth. I love the story, but I don’t believe it happened. And that’s pretty much what I said to the assembled group yesterday when it was my turn to speak. It is a wonderful dreamy tale. The same logic that tells me we humans on Earth are not alone in the Universe, suggests that humanoid creatures in military uniforms probably don’t undress women from Portsmouth on flying saucers in the White Mountains. Barney’s mysteriously scuffed up shoes and broken binocular strap are far from definitive proof of extraterrestrial abduction.

Valerie Cunningham ducked the UFO issue entirely during her presentation, focusing on Barney and Betty’s role as civil rights activists.

Of the three speakers, I was by far the least qualified. Val and Kathy knew Barney and Betty well. But I know people and I know history. And my gut tells me that, while something certainly happened that night in 1961, it was not a close encounter of the third kind. That’s just my opinion, and since Prof. David Watters asked me to be the third member of the UNH panel, I threw in my two cents. Being a journalist and a history writer has made me a skeptic. Tales people tell, I find, are rarely what they seem. The "facts" in this case – the missing two hours, the reportedly magnetic spots on the Hills’ car, the testimony delivered under hypnosis, Betty’s famous "Star Map" sketch – simply do not hold water for me. I told Betty so in person, and she never took it personally. I have my theories, but this was neither the time nor place.

My point was not to debunk the story. You cannot win a debate with ufologists. And like I said, I love the story, even though I don’t believe it. My point at the seminar was simply that Betty and Barney, even without the UFO incident, are compelling characters. Both were intelligent, interesting, energetic, and big-hearted. They were a brave interracial couple who had been married for seven years before interracial marriage became legal in all the United States.

True or not, it has had a profound effect on popular culture. The story-behind-the-story is what fascinates me. And that story is richer still as a result of the collections that Valerie and Kathy have donated to the UNH library. Val has given much of her local African-American history research and Kathy gave a goodly portion of her Aunt Betty’s UFO materials. It’s an unlikely combo, but it works.

For the next month, a few of these items are on display in the hallway outside the Milne Special Collections room on the bottom floor of the Dimond Library. Betty’s dress is there, the one she says the alien’s removed to do their physical exam. The plaster head of "Junior" the alien is there as well, plus some of Betty’s UFO photos, artist-renderings of the Hill’s alleged adventure, and documents from their civil rights work. We all wandered over after the lectures. I was pleased to see my article about the Hills set out for visitors to read.

But on this topic, I was truly outgunned. My role was merely to voice a balancing skeptical view and to add a little comic relief. My reward was to hear a few brief phrases spoken from the grave by Barney himself. He sounded surprisingly like James Earl Jones in the film "The UFO Incident". Or more accurately, Jones did a good job of sounding like Barney.

FOR MORE: on the Hill Collection click here

© 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.

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