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This work belongs to :Nigel Watson
THE DEATH of Betty Hill on 17 October 2004, at the age of 85, makes us reconsider her role in the history of UFO abduction research. She was mourned by the UFO community as a true pioneer yet she never totally believed in the alien abductions of many of the ‘experiencers’ who came forward after her story became public in 1965. She was equally scathing of alien abduction researchers.
    Betty was the one most interested in finding out more about her alien encounter, whilst Barney was inclined to dismiss it and sweep it under the carpet as a bad dream.

Their UFO sighting
Determining whether the Hills actually saw something inexplicable in the sky in the first place, would add a lot of credence to their abduction story. If they had only seen a planet or aircraft then it would seem highly likely that their abduction was just a story created by their imaginations.
    The only official investigation into the UFO was conducted by Major Paul W. Henderson who spoke to the Hills by telephone only a few hours after their encounter. It took Project Blue Book two years to produce a final report on their sighting. Dated 27 September 1963, it claimed that there was insufficient evidence to determine what caused their sighting. It guesses that they probably saw Jupiter or a similar ‘natural’ cause.
    UFO researcher Robert Sheaffer agreed with Blue Book’s opinion after he interviewed Betty Hill. He found that she was not able to provide a very reliable chart of the UFO in relation to the stars and planets visible at the time. She remembered seeing the bright UFO, the moon and a planet. Sheaffer calculated that she should have seen two bright planets and the moon, so by his reckoning the UFO was really Jupiter. It is not unusual for drivers to see stars or planets appearing to follow their car at night, and any moving clouds can intensify the view that they are moving fast in the sky.
    It’s worth adding that in the fall of 1965 there was a spate of UFO sightings in the area of Exeter, New Hampshire. John Fuller spent a month interviewing witnesses who saw bright, flashing lights. The most notable case occurred in the early hours of 3 September when police patrolmen saw a group of lights at close range manoeuvre over a field. Many of the sightings were made near power lines, which made some consider that they were some form of plasma discharge. Robert Sheaffer claimed that most of the sightings were probably of Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. A criticism of Fuller’s book about the sightings, Incident at Exeter, was that it dwelt on the reactions of the witnesses rather than on details of their sightings. (1, 2) The same criticism could be directed at his book The Interrupted Journey, that it merely assembles information without analysing it in much detail or putting it into a wider context.

Radar
Betty Hill claims that at 2.14 a.m. on 20 September 1961, Pease Air Force Base picked up a UFO on radar and that they sent out two aircraft to investigate it. What the pilots saw, according to Betty, has remained classified ever since. (3)
    A local newspaper reporter confirmed that UFOs had been tracked on radar that night, but he lost his notes and would not reveal the source of his information. The only real information we have about what Jacques Vallée claims is detection by military radar of the Hills’ UFO is contained in the Blue Book file No. 100-1-61:

During a casual conversation on 22 Sept 61 between Major Gardiner B. Reynolds, 100th B S DC01and Captain Robert O. Daughaday, Commander 1917-2 AACS DIT, Pease AFB, N.H., it was revealed that a strange incident occurred at 0214 local on 20 Sept. No importance was attached to the incident at the time.’(4)

    We have to ask what they mean by a ‘strange incident’? Was it just a strange blip on the screen or something more substantial? From the casual way this is reported it does not sound as if it was something that would cause them to scramble a couple of aircraft. Even if something was seen or tracked on radar it does not mean they tracked the same object that the Hills said they saw.
    It would be great if any further files are ever released on this matter, but they either do not exist or they are firmly hidden away from public gaze. For now we can only say that any allegation that the Hills' UFO was tracked by radar is not backed up by any firm proof or evidence.

Missing time
When they arrived home after the encounter both their watches had stopped running, so they were surprised to see that their kitchen clock gave the time as 5 a.m. Though, as we have noted, it was not until much later that they were fully aware that they had lost two hours of ‘missing time’. Their watches never worked again.
    Peter Rogerson notes that Barney estimated that they would have got home by 2 or 3 a.m. if they were travelling at an average of between 50 mph and 65 mph, depending on road conditions. He stopped to watch the UFO through binoculars, and they slowed down and stopped at other times to see the UFO, considerably cutting down his average speed. Furthermore, in his frame of mind he could well have taken a few detours, thus the so-called two hours of missing time could easily have been accounted for without recourse to an alien abduction scenario.(5)
    Other researchers, including Jenny Randles, have also not found any evidence to prove that witnesses have actually missed any time at all. A matter of losing more than a few hours is very rare.
    Peter Rogerson adds that whilst the Hill investigation was under way the November 1962 issue of Flying Saucers magazine contained the story of Private Gerry Irwin who went AWOL and had periods of amnesia after witnessing a UFO (or aircraft) crash. Missing time, and an abduction featuring a medical examination that is uncovered through the use of hypnosis is also featured in a fictional story ‘Control Somnambule’ in the May 1962 issue of Playboy. Whether the Hills actually saw the latter is disputable but the concept of missing time was certainly prevalent.(6)

Auto effects
On the advice of a physicist who was the neighbour of Betty’s sister, she tested the car for radiation with a compass. The compass needle seemed to move erratically over six, strange, shiny spots the size of a dollar on the car’s trunk, but when Barney tried the same test the needle acted normally. Whatever the behaviour of the needle this would not be a method of detecting radiation.
    Whether these spots were radioactive or not we must wonder how a flying saucer might have caused them. Perhaps they were created on the two occasions when they heard the strange beeping or buzzing sound coming from the trunk of their car? Perhaps the craft shot something at the trunk of the car which made the beeping sounds and left these spots? Furthermore, these sounds came when the Hills went into and out of a drowsy trance-like condition. If they encountered a spaceship then it would not be beyond its capabilities to be armed with this type of mind-controlling technology. Reinforcing this idea Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman in their book The Unidentified say that many contactees have reported a bee-buzzing sound that introduced and ended their encounters with space people.(7)
    Martin Cannon tells of the experiences of a defence sub-contractor Rex Niles who came under psychoelectronic surveillance. There were 250 watts of microwaves (whatever that means) registered outside his home and underneath the dashboard of his car he found a radioactive disk. According to Cannon such disks are often used by clandestine services to act as a silent, cancer-inducing, killer. He speculates that the shiny spots on the Hills’ car indicate that a radioactive or electromagnetic device was fixed to it. If the latter was deployed it could have caused disorientating effects on the Hills and caused them to imagine their UFO encounter.(
    A more mundane explanation is given by Karl Pflock who notes that when the Hills got home they found the lid of the trunk was not closed properly. This could have happened just before Barney’s first close encounter with the UFO when he took a hand gun out of the car’s trunk. In his panic stricken state he could easily have left the lid unlatched, thereby causing the strange sounds when the car roared away from Indian Head and when it hit a rough area of road a bit later on. Given the circumstances Pflock argues that anything out-of-the-ordinary, such as the loose trunk lid, would be regarded as something to do with the UFO.(9)

Dress code
After the encounter Barney found the strap of his binoculars broken. If his binoculars had a well-used strap it could easily have been pulled and broken by the traumatized Barney during the sighting of the UFO. The safety of his binoculars was after all the least of his problems. We might also ask why aliens would want to break the strap of his binoculars?
    Following the encounter the tops of Barney’s toe caps were found to be scuffed. This would substantiate his statement that he was dragged by his arms towards the landed UFO when he was abducted.
    The dress Betty wore during the abduction was found to be covered in a pink powder. When this was shaken off it left pink stains behind. She also found the hem and seams torn. The patterned, purple dress has been kept in her closet and over the years she has cut sections off it to satisfy the requests of laboratories throughout the world.(10)
    One study of the dress was initiated by Bill Konkolesky who on 16 July 2002, sent 3×4 cm sections of the fabric to the Pinelandia Biophysics Laboratory. They grew wheat seedlings in water samples soaked in sections of the dress that were stained and control samples that were not stained. They found that the wheat seedlings grown in the stained water grew much better. Their conclusion was that whatever stained the dress showed it could ‘alter metabolic activity in a living organism.’ The report warns that they do not know if the material on the dress would have any impact on other living systems, and they could not assess if the many years of storage had changed the characteristics of the stains.(11) This,like other studies of the substance,leaves us with more questions than answers. So far no one has provided any evidence that it is of exceptional, let alone extraterrestrial, origin.
    Strange stains have been found on abductees’ bodies and bed clothes; keeping samples has proved difficult as these substances tend to evaporate or the traces are insufficient to make any form of adequate analysis possible.(12)

Return of the ear rings
Even weirder, Betty claims that six to eight weeks after their encounter they returned home to find a pile of leaves on their kitchen table. They had just been back to the mountains searching for the location of their abduction to see if it triggered any memories. When cleaning up the mess she found the blue ear rings she had been wearing the night of the encounter. She quite reasonably wondered how she lost them and how they got in their home. From this we can presume there were no signs of a break-in. The problem with this story is that most accounts say they visited the mountains in the early part of 1962, and the earliest suggestion for them to make these trips was made on 25 November, 1961. The ear ring story would indicate that they searched for the location before the end of 1961. It is not surprising if Betty has got the time of this mixed up; what this indicated to her was that the aliens had stolen her ear rings and they knew where they lived. (13)

Telepathy
There is an ambiguity in the means of communication that was used during the Hill abduction. Barney seemed to think they spoke through their eyes in a telepathic manner. Their thoughts came into his head without them speaking. (14) They did have small mouths and spoke to each other in a gurgling humming fashion. (15) Betty said they used normal English speech. They did always have a full grasp of English and the concepts the words conveyed.
    Generally the abductee hears inside their head or gets an impression of what the aliens want them to do. According to Jacobs there are no cases of an abduction occurring that involved completely spoken communication. (16) Abductee ‘Arthur’ asserts that you have to eliminate your fear so that you can establish telepathic communication with the aliens. Negativity of any kind blocks communication. The aliens seem to be able to look inside our minds especially if the abductee stares into their eyes. (17)

Writing
Budd Hopkins reveals that he keeps a secret file of the letters, numbers and symbols that abductees remember seeing inside UFOs. He terms them ‘notational symbols’, which are remarkably consistent in a wide range of abduction stories. So far he has not made the file public because he uses it to assess the genuineness of new abduction reports. (18)
    It is not very difficult to find examples of alien writing; samples are given by George Adamski and the medium Hélène Smith who produced elaborate alien language and writing. Betty Andreasson saw a glowing book and Betty Hill gives a detailed description of an alien book containing curved and straight lined writing like Japanese. Like Flournoy, who investigated Smith’s claims, it is difficult to determine whether these are the product of the person’s imagination or not.
    According to research by Leonard Keane, the star language by Betty Andreasson when under hypnosis, seems to be Gaelic. A translation of her speech is a warning that the descendents of the Northern peoples will suffer due to the mistakes of those in high places. This suggests that the aliens are more connected to our planet than to the stars. (19)
    Since 1999 Gary Anthony has conducted an Alien Semiotics Project to use linguistic analysis to review claims of spoken and written alien language. They have not been impressed by the so-called alien origin of any of the material given them so far, but they are still looking. (20)

Interesting…