UFOS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE

No one can prove or disprove that this New Hampshire couple was taken aboard an alien spacecraft. Believes will believe, skeptics will not. But we can all agree that Betty and Barney Hill enjoyed one of America’s most fascinating interracial love affairs. (Read the full story below)

Love among the flying saucers

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Let’s forget for a moment that Betty and Barney Hill claimed they were taken aboard an alien UFO. Their alleged abduction in the White Mountains on September 19, 1961 came to define the rest of their days. It made them, for a time, one of the most famous couples in America. Their shared nightmare, revealed through hypnosis, united the Portsmouth couple. But the international publicity that followed threatened to tear them apart.

Let’s think of this, instead, as a love story. It is the marriage of two activist souls. Even before their UFO adventure, real or imagined, Betty and Barney were truth seekers, fighting against social injustice and inequality. An interracial couple married in 1960, they lived in an era when discrimination was rampant, even in New England.

Life Before UFOs

Eunice Elizabeth ("Betty") Barrett was born on June 28, 1919 and grew up on a Kingston, NH farm. Spunky, agile, intelligent, and creative, she always saw herself as special, destined for great things. Betty wanted to leave the family farm so badly, according to college friend Dr. Mary Ann Franklin, that she asked her parents permission to join a passing circus as an acrobat in training. Permission was denied. At the University of New Hampshire Betty socialized with Franklin, the only African-American on campus. Betty spoke out for liberal issues and supported her friend in difficult times.

"She was very active," Dr Franklin, age 87, says today. "She may have had a problem as a result of that because so many people of that time were not accepting of racial equality."

Betty took a fateful break from college just as the United States entered World War II. She worked as a waitress in a seacoast diner, married the cook and adopted his three children. When that marriage ended in divorce after 14 years, Betty returned to UNH, graduated in 1958 and became a social worker. She shrewdly spent her settlement on a house on a busy street in Portsmouth. When Gulf Oil offered to buy and demolish her house to build a gas station, she negotiated twice the price, then purchased her own house back for a dollar and moved it to a nearby lot where she lived until her death in 2004.

Three years younger, Barney Hill was born on July 29, 1922 at Newport News, Virginia and evolved into an unflinching activist. A high school dropout, Barney joined the Army and served three years in World War II as a truck driver. It is not surprising that, when describing his alien abductors years later, Barney pictured them in military caps like those worn by Nazi soldiers. He was injured in a grenade accident on a firing range and honorably discharged in 1943, then started a family in Philadelphia.

Betty met Barney Hill in the mid-1950s when he was vacationing in New Hampshire with his first wife. When that marriage dissolved, he and Betty married, but it took months for Barney to uproot himself from Philly and move to Portsmouth. He took a night job as a postal worker in Boston, enduring a 90-minute commute each way. The transition to a predominantly white New England town, far from his friends and his two boys, weighed heavily on him.

CONTINUE HILL ROMANCE
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The Interrupted Sentimental Journey

Married only 16 months, working separate shifts, the Hills had seen little of each other when they took a belated weekend "honeymoon" with their dog Delsey in the fall of 1961. That quick trip to Niagra Falls and Montreal has become the stuff of legend. Barney was nervous, fearful that a Canadian motel might not accept an interracial couple with a dog late at night. The couple decided to drive all the way home to Portsmouth. They were carrying Betty’s handgun for protection and were afraid it might be discovered at the border as they crossed back into the United States. They were tense and arguing when Betty spotted weird lights in the New Hampshire sky.

Whatever happened that night will remain a mystery. Arriving home, at first, the Hills only remembered the bright lights that followed them down the highway. There was a shared sense of loss, as if a period of time was missing from their memories. They reported their UFO sighting to Air Force officials and to relatives and a few close friends. Betty had nightmares. Barney got ill and could not work. Their relationship appeared to unravel. In desperation, Betty and Barney asked Dr. Benjamin Simon of Boston to hypnotize them separately. The recorded sessions uncovered – some say created – a detailed story in which the couple were examined aboard an alien space craft. Barney was slow to accept the wild tale that came from his own mouth.

Critics sometimes accuse the Hills of cashing in on their abduction tale. In fact, it was years before they told the story publicly at a Quaker meeting house in Dover in 1965. They "went public" only to dispute an unauthorized account of their close encounter that had appeared in the Boston Traveler. John Fuller, a reporter for Look magazine, was in the audience at the Hills lecture that night. Fuller was working on another UFO book entitled The Incident at Exeter. Fuller urged the couple to quickly sign a book contract. They did, but only after Betty negotiated a comfortable share of the royalties for the Hills and Dr. Simon. The story based on the taped transcripts is presented, often in agonizing detail, in Fuller’s best selling book The Interrupted Journey. It has been dissected by UFO believers and skeptics for four decades.

Feeling Alienated

For Barney Hill, a civil rights leader in his community, the UFO incident was distracting, emasculating and embarrassing. He feared that the tabloid publicity would tarnish their battle for equality and dignity. And it did. Barney was, even then, taking on racist businesses that refused to serve black customers. Asked why he would not hire a black student as a grocery clerk, a Portsmouth storeowner said it was common knowledge that hiring Negroes led to interracial marriage.

Flying saucers dominated the first four paragraphs of Barney Hill’s obituary in 1969. His lifetime membership in the NAACP, his founding of the Rockingham Community Action program, his legal battles to end discriminatory hiring practices, his appointment to the New Hampshire’s civil liberties commission – all were dwarfed by the publicity from the alien encounter.

Barney’s sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage devastated Betty. Her college friend and life-long acquaintance Dr. Mary Ann Franklin suggests that Betty never stopped grieving for her soul mate. Betty’s niece Kathleen Marden offers a telling anecdote in her new book Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, written with UFO expert Stanton Friedman. Marden recalls the first time Betty left her house following Barney’s funeral. Betty stopped on Route 125 at about 9 p.m. and got out of her car to examine a UFO that hovered over nearby power lines. She assumed, according to Marden that the aliens inside the craft were "curious" about Barney’s death. "When she [Betty] pointed in the direction of Barney’s grave," Marden writes, "the craft rocked back and forth three or four times, crossed over the highway, and headed in the general direction of the cemetery."

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Spreading the Word

After Barney’s death, Betty continued her quest. Why, she wondered, had they been selected by the aliens? What were the aliens planning? Telling her story endlessly, to experts, friends and the media, seemed to bring her comfort. Betty freely gave interviews to hundreds of publications, including Playboy magazine, and radio stations. She continued appearances on television talk shows, even taking a lie detector test with celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey. Betty passed with flying colors because she truly believed her story. Critics point out, however, that belief does not always equal reality. Betty welcomed curious visitors into her home and traveled internationally, finding kindred souls everywhere. And wherever she went, she talked about life with her beloved Barney Hill.

Considered the most documented of all alleged UFO abductions, the Hill story formed the bedrock of books and films that followed. Actor James Earl Jones was so drawn to the story of Barney Hill, an African American, that he purchased the screen rights to Fuller’s bestseller. The UFO Incident, a made-for-TV-movie adaptation, was released in 1975. Some say that film inspired Steven Speilberg’s 1977 blockbuster Close Encounters. As the Star Wars and X-Files craze continued, Betty’s celebrity grew, her story even making its way into classroom textbooks.

In the film The UFO Incident, James Earl Jones – the voice of CNN, Darth Vader and the Lion King -- plays Barney with the emotional range of King Lear. He sobs uncontrollably, explodes with rage, giggles, drones on in robotic tones, then coos and erupts in belly laughs. He is a man on the verge of a breakdown, stitched together only by convention and conscious will. Dr. Simon, who conducted the hypnosis sessions, never accepted the abduction theory. He was looking, instead, for psychological roots to Barney’s physical ailments and Betty’s nightmares. Actress Estelle Parsons plays Betty as shrill and intense, but deeply in love. In a scene in the film that is difficult to watch, Betty tearfully reports that she was subjected to an agonizing pregnancy test aboard the UFO when the aliens probed her navel with a needle. Portions of their hypnosis tapes, considered too intimate for public exposure, have never been released.

Riding Off the Rails

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what happened next. Encouraged by her growing band of converts and curious followers, Betty Hill came to think of herself as a human "transducer" who could communicate with UFOs. In the 1970s and 80s Betty returned continuously to her favorite landing sites, especially those in East Kingston, not far from the childhood farm she had once longed to escape. Often accompanied by friends and reporters, she photographed, filmed and logged the comings and goings of what she believed to be alien spacecraft.

In one period from 1982 to 1989, she and her amateur field crew recorded 2,998 UFOs in 204 trips. Betty gave countless slide presentations and continued telling her story to an ever-widening audience. Author John Fuller wrote privately to Betty imploring her to avoid publicity, to protect her reputation and to be less subjective. Betty did not listen. She was on a quest for the truth of a lost companion.

Through her niece and biographer Kathleen Marden, Betty donated many of her books papers, films and photos to her alma mater. Her famous blue dress, the one reputedly removed by alien fingers, rests in the Milne Special Collections room in the bottom floor of the Dimond Library at UNH. Among those items is her record of UFO sightings. A close reading of those carefully typed journals speaks of a love undimmed by time. Betty talks openly and telepathically to the UFOs that hover outside her car window. They play music for her in honor of Barney. She implores the flying saucers to bring peace to a fragile world. Communing with them became her meditation and her reality.

Toward the end of her journey, Betty wrote a book. A Common Sense Approach to UFOs is a rambling defense of her position as the original alien abductee. It is dedicated "to UFOs with Love." The aliens, at last, had become her best friends and a link to happier times. The lights she saw in the night sky were now always there, hovering like guardian angels. Like her, they remembered that night in 1961. Like her, they cared forever and ever about handsome, honest Barney Hill. And like Betty, they missed him terribly.

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IMPORTANT COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyright © 2008 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced in part or in whole in any form without expressed written permission of the author and SeacoastNH.com. Portions of this article have appeared in the UNH Magazine and in the Portsmouth Herald.