From Bill to Gill to Hill: Part Three--Hill.

The Betty and Barney Hill CE4 is the most famous UFO case other than Roswell. It is also, with Roswell, the most detailed. Because of that, I'll be skipping a lot of the detail in order to keep this short of a book. If you want to read a book, you can read John Fuller's The Interrupted Journey, which still does a good job of narrating the encounter. Very little, other than the hullaballoo about the "star map", has developed since Fuller did his very good work. [The star map is mentioned in Fuller but the raft of speculations about it came later.] For our purposes, "HILL" is the third step in the ["logical"? inevitable? reasonable?] chain of experiences which constitute the backbone of mainstream UFOlogy. "If there are aerial technologies, and if there are occupants associated with them, then there might be some instances where a human was taken on board". Whereas step two is almost forced by step one, step three is not. One can readily imagine "visitations" wherein no such close contact took place, and likewise imagine reasons why it might not be desirable by the visitors. So, although evidence for step one is rather overwhelming, and therefore the lesser but still substantial pile of step two cases have a strong foundation from which to find acceptance, "on-board experiences" are in a much more readily doubtable position and require an extra dose of solidity to make them believable. Some say such evidence is all over the place and the dilemma is solved. I don't find it so. Most of the popular evidence for on-board experiences, I find, turns out to be claim rather than substance. Some people say evidence for on-board experience is non-existent. I don't find that extreme to be true either. [the mere fact that both these positions exist in the UFO community shows how unsure all this CE4 business is, and how poorly the advocates have made their case.] My view, and I am just one more puzzled onlooker, is that there are a few well-documented and well-researched CE4s to find credibility in, but not a lot. This doesn't mean that a lot have not happened; it means that the work on them is, to me, unconvincing. The case that comes as close to "convincing" as any other is the Hill case. It is in many ways the "same" as most of the modern popular claims, but since it was nearly the first and widely publicized [even in a movie] presents the possibility that later likenesses are wannabees rather than realities. It also differs from the highly restrictive story prominent today, wherein all cases have to be almost assembly line clones of one another. Hopefully I'll remember to remark on some of the [what are to me] critical differences. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
{this narrative of the case is taken as much as possible from the directly agreed upon thoughts of Betty Hill}. On the night of September 19/29, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were returning to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire through the White Mountains. They saw a bright object in the sky. Barney stopped the car and got out to look at it with binoculars. [Barney is at the left returning to the scene]. It reversed path and flew erratically. [This path was upon consideration geometric in nature like a continuous drawing of three-sided boxes or a square-toothed line in the air as it went forward]. They continued driving and occasionally stopping. Then the object approached the car more closely and to the front. It was flat with wrap-around windows. Barney got out and watched intently. He saw figures within the windows dressed in shiny black uniforms. Barney felt that there was some communication which terrified him and he ran back to the car laughing hysterically and saying that they were going to capture them. He rapidly drove off to the sound of close-by beeping noises directed at the car. Thirty miles further on, after not seeing the object again, they were bombarded by the same sounds. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------They arrived home apparently without incident and Betty called her sister telling her some of the story. Her sister called a physicist who suggested that radiation be checked. She also called police who suggested the Air Force. The Pease AFB official initially thought that they're nuts, but became interested when Barney got on the phone and told details of how the object looked. ---------------------On the 21st Pease called back and said they've been working on the case. They were filing a report for Blue Book. Both Betty and Barney were pretty frightened by the experience, and, despite not being particularly interested in UFOs before--especially Barney--, became of the opinion that they have had a close UFO encounter. Barney went to the local library and checked out a book by Keyhoe. Betty, always an "action" person, wrote Keyhoe soon [the 26th] and asked him for reading suggestions. She also mentions that their fascination about this is so great now, that they want to return to the site in hopes of re-seeing the object. -----------------------Keyhoe, always the paranoid when it came to anything smelling of contact, did not immediately respond substantively. Sometime later, Dick Hall wrote to legendary field case researcher Walt Webb and asked him to look in on the incident. This was not until mid-October. Meanwhile, as of September 30th, Betty began having vivid dreams of being captured and taken on board for a physical examination. Betty wrote these down, but hid them away and did not tell Barney. And Barney remained disturbed by all this, believing that he had some kind a mental block about something that he subconsciously didn't want to remember.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Walt Webb visited the Hills on October 21st. His interview went well, he liked them and vice versa, and his report was his usual thorough job. He mailed it back to Keyhoe with "case sounds like a humdinger". Keyhoe had Webb's report on his desk when he was visited by two IBM personnel. Robert Hohmann was a science/engineering writer working out of the New York area [Kingston], and C.D. Jackson was a senior engineer, working out of [apparently] Huntsville, Alabama, where Werner von Braun's rocket boys worked. The Huntsville facility was a hot bed of UFO interest in the 1950s with senior engineers speaking to the press favorably on the subject, and von Braun's mentor, Hermann Oberth, residing there twice, his opinions on the extraterrestrial nature of UFOs well known. Hohmann and Jackson had become interested in the early 1900s attempts to receive extraterrestrial signals [by Tesla, Marconi, and Todd---H&J felt that TMT had succeeded] and had become convinced about UFOs at the same time. Keyhoe, probably impressed by the IBM credentials, pointed to Webb's brand new report and let them read it. This led to them ultimately contacting the Hills and visiting them on November 25th. They got along well, and during the conversations it became apparent to H&J that there was a significant period of lost time in the narrative. That along with Barney's mental block, indicated that there was more information to be dug out. [Betty said that they knew from the beginning that their arrival home was way too late, but had not focussed on that as significant.] Sometime thereafter a good friend of the Hills from Pease suggested hypnosis to pry the info out. Nothing happens immediately though. -----------------------------------------------------Worried that maybe all this is due to illness of some kind causing hallucinations, the Hills see a doctor in early 1962. Nothing is recommended. In the summer, Barney sees a psychiatrist about on-going anxiety. Again nothing. Betty may have mentioned her "capture" dreams during a UFO talk during this time. Barney remains very disturbed and by the end of 1963, friends at Pease encourage them to undergo hypnosis to find the cause. That is when Benjamin Simon was contacted. Simon had been formerly in the military and had used hypnosis for trauma victims of war. He was then in private practice [and expensive]. He worked with the Hills [in separated sessions] for seven months, once a week, and ended every session with suggestions that they would not remember the content of the hypnosis until the treatments were over. From these sessions came, of course the classic "abduction" account that is iconic for the genre. ----------------------------------I'll not go through all of that. Briefly, it involved the involuntary taking of the Hills from their car, dragging Barney along, placing them in separate rooms of a round craft, examining them on tables, messing about with Barney's private parts, being friendly with Betty, showing her the star map, and, among other things, letting them go with the comment that they wouldn't remember. Tapes of at least some of these sessions exist and are often spectacularly emotional. Simon was perplexed. The responses were so genuine that they had to be true at least in the minds of the Hills. But the story was so far beyond his ken that it had to be false. Publicly he seemed to always be grasping for some exotic psychiatric solution to the case, while admitting that the Hills were good honest people. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course everyone wanted to know about the creatures. As the story went, there were a great many of them, about a dozen or so being seen on the road at the first capture. Many if not all of these were described as wearing black uniforms and ballcaps. They were short, greyish or pallid, with thin limbs, large skulls with relatively broad foreheads, large deep-set eyes with pupils, significant sized noses and mouths. Their chests were broad though their hips were not. Mumbling or ooooo-ing sounds issued from them. The "leader" seemed to communicate with Betty non-verbally [telepathically?]. Note that although having areas of similarity with modern ideas of "Grays" which dominate the literature [and are claimed by some researchers to be the only real "alien" type], there are several differences. Although the eyes are broad, they are deep-set and not wrap-around like some form of ET-sunglasses. This is a much more understandable evolutionary feature, as are pupils, mouths, and noses. Hills' creatures also can make sounds. Although the necks are thin, they are not pencil-thin, as if belonging to robots or stick figures rather than organic beings. One thing that makes little sense either for Hills' ETs or modern "Grays" are the ultra-thin hips. No creature of evolutionary descent would have hips so narrow that the huge heads couldn't make it through the birth canal. One rescues this by saying that a) we're only dealing with males [and females are significantly sexually dimorphic] ; b) the race has been engaged in genetic engineering on a significant scale and has altered their basic forms and reproductive methods; or c) we really are only dealing with robotic techno-creations. The only one of these which could save the modern speculation that these things are interested in messing about with human genetics for their own uses, is number one. The robots don't need anything biological, and super-genetic engineers don't need any help. And I don't buy the line about hybridization at all, as using human genes for anything is a waste of time when you're that advanced and can make anything you want for yourselves without invading the bedrooms of several million people. Note also two further major discrepancies with the common tale. This is no bedroom visitation [that begins showing up with gusto in the late 1970s in the HUMCAT reports to Ted Bloecher, and as an avalanche following Budd Hopkins' Missing Time.] The second thing is: Betty and Barney are not "repeaters". They have no on-going "abductions" over and over and stretching back through to childhood. Betty used to scoff [or worse] at this idea, which she stated very explicitly as the product of bad hypnosis techniques [more akin to stage hypnosis than the professional variety that Simon used, she said] and was in her view dangerous and leading people astray. She even went on a little crusade of sorts trying to talk "miss-led" persons out of their ET-abduction beliefs. Whatever one thinks of all that, the Hills had the benefit of a professional, highly qualified practitioner, who was not biased towards UFOlogy, and who documented everything, the contents of which are open for all to see. It's difficult to find these qualities in many CE4 situations, which reduces them to "believe it or not" in my mind. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A unique element of the case is the star map. This is a display in the room to which Betty was taken and which manifested itself sort of like a three dimensional holographic map "in" the wall. Betty asked the "leader" what this was, and it was clearly indicated as a map containing the home star system of the UFOnauts. Solid lines on the map were said to connect star systems which were commonly visited, and dashed lines were said to extend to systems only occasionally visited. Betty was told the names of none of the stars, and was not pointed out the location of the Sun on the map. All she had were her hypnotically-retrieved memories of the map's shape. This she set down during one session. People immediately began to try to figure the map out. Betty herself was fascinated and tried her hand. [It is interesting that Hohmann and Jackson, knowing nothing of any star map yet, talked to the Hills about their opinion of the likely location of ET life. Betty's "solution" contained neither of their two stars. She was an honest lady and an independent thinker]. During the 1970s, an Ohio State Master's degree student, Marjorie Fish, was creating a three dimensional map of the local star space. She heard of the Hills' map, and searched her own. She felt that she found a match and it was a non-random one. She denominated the Hill stars as all the Sun-like stars in the nearby space generally to galactic south of the Sun. It was an exciting claim [and could even be true]. "Home" was Zeta Reticuli, which is where that obscure system enters pop culture today. ----------------------------------------------------------------------Of course, astronomer skeptics yelled foul. Carl Sagan led the charge claiming that many such matches could be found in a place as big as the galaxy ["billions and billions", remember?] and that this was not a good geometrical match anyway. Well, he's right and wrong all at once [as nearly all extremist screamers turn out to be]. He's right about being able to draw a very large number of connections which would look vaguely like Betty's diagram---billions and billions it is. Marjorie Fish knows that. She felt that the connection of all the sun-like nearby stars, and only the sun-like nearby stars was intriguing. She's right, even if Carl doesn't want to give her that. It also doesn't prove that her match is true. It is intriguing. It is not proof of anything. Carl also showed that if you take away the connecting lines, the stars of the Hill map look nothing like the stars of the Fish map, as to geometry. He's right. But why would anyone want to erase those lines since they were the outstanding feature of Betty's memory? Carl has set up a straw man, just like all dishonest debaters do. What we should admit is that if Betty remembered this correctly [and that is asking a lot], she remembered a certain number of stars, in approximate positions, fortified by a clear set of connecting lines. Fish's map meets those criteria. And going to Sun-like systems makes some exploratory and even "colonial" sense. That's what we can say. That's all we can say--but it is more than Carl Sagan was willing to say. Intellectual honesty is an endangered species in all of the anomalistic studies.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Allen Hynek ultimately went to New Hampshire [lot closer than Papua] to visit Betty and Barney, and even Benjamin Simon came to give a last hypnosis session, essentially for UFOlogy's "grand old man". Hynek was wowed [despite being, admittedly a clutz at asking questions]. Barney's terror blew him away. Hynek never knew what he should make of this [you can read his fiddling commentary in his book] but he was sure that he was witnessing the effects of something real. I'm with him on this. For me, the "All-The-Way-Fool" position is that the Hills' experience is what it seems to be: an on-board encounter. As a memorial of the great time, each one of the five members of that last session took home a card with them signed by all---a repro of it is above. A rather fine thing, methinks, and good sentiments.