CAPTURED! the Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience
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T HE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD’ S F IRST DOCUMENTED A LIEN ABDUCTION CAPTURED! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience S TANTON T. F RIEDMAN, MSC. AND K ATHLEEN MARDEN NEW PAGE BOOKS A division of The Career Press, Inc. Franklin Lakes, NJ Contents Foreword . 9 Preface . 15 Introduction . 19 Chapter 1: . 23 A Glimpse Into the Lives of Betty and Barney Hill Chapter 2: . 31 An Evening’s Journey Chapter 3: . 37 The Project Blue Book Report Chapter 4: . 49 A Formal Investigation Begins Chapter 5: . 61 The Hills Begin Their Own Investigation Chapter 6: . 73 Hypnosis Chapter 7: . 83 The Trouble With Betty’s Dreams Chapter 8: . 89 Canada to Colebrook Chapter 9: . 99 An Unconventional Craft Approaches Chapter 10: . 111 Conscious Memory Fades Chapter 11: . 119 The Abduction Experience Chapter 12: . 129 Betty’s Interview With the Leader Chapter 13: . 135 The Occupants Chapter 14: . 147 Release From Capture Chapter 15: . 155 A Tenuous Diagnosis Chapter 16: . 167 Admiral Herbert Bain Knowles Chapter 17: . 179 A New Focus Chapter 18: . 185 A Betrayal of Trust Chapter 19: . 201 Psychophysics Experiments Chapter 20: . 219 Sky Watch 1967 Chapter 21: . 227 Life Without Barney Chapter 22: . 235 The Star Map Investigation Chapter 23: . 245 Disbelievers and Disinformants Chapter 24: . 263 The Dress Analysis Chapter 25: . 269 Betty’s Fall From Grace Epilogue . 283 Appendix . 287 Notes . 301 Bibliography . 305 Index . 311 About the Authors . 317 Foreword by Dr. Bruce Maccabee After all these years since I first read their story, I still find it some- what amazing that the aliens didn’t know how to operate a zipper and would have ripped Betty’s dress off her if she hadn’t shown them how to operate it. (Perhaps they had forgotten because it was so long ago in their cultural history, or perhaps they had bypassed the zipper period of devel- opment and jumped directly to the Velcro period.) And after all these years I am still surprised that they were surprised that Barney’s teeth could be removed, but Betty’s couldn’t. Did they also bypass the false teeth era? Or perhaps the aliens don’t have teeth. So now we know that way back then they didn’t know everything. But they did demonstrate their technical superiority by performing on Betty what appears to have been an amniocentesis several years before that procedure was common in Earth hospitals. Well, it seemed to be an amniocentesis, but maybe it was something else far more advanced. Will we ever know? And my mind still boggles over the way Betty allowed all that pink dusty stuff to just blow away in the wind. It was chemical evidence of the abduction! And then there were the shiny spots on the car with the rotating magnetic fields that were ignored by investigator Walter Webb. What? Did you say rotating magnetic fields in the metal of a car? That’s impossible! Reading this book I felt that “it’s deja vu all over again,” except this time I was learning the answers to questions I had when I first read about Betty and Barney Hill almost 40 years ago. Furthermore, I now had the benefit of 40 years of UFO history and my own investigations into nu- merous sightings. Way back then, in that ufologically more innocent era, when flying saucers seen in the sky and perhaps on the ground 9 10 b Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience were essentially the whole story, I could not have known that numerous other cases of abduction would be reported over the ensuing decades. b To more fully understand the historical importance of the Betty and Barney Hill case, one must turn back the clock to the 1960s, when the only public reports of direct interactions with “space beings” were the sightings reported by the so-called contactees (George Adamski being the most famous). These contactees reported enlightening and delightful experiences aboard highly advanced flying craft. They reported having conversations with friendly aliens who were protecting the world from evil on a cosmic scale and who advised humanity to stop building atomic bombs. The contactees told fantastic stories that attracted thousands of people to their numerous lectures. They enjoyed their cosmic interac- tions. They had a following. Then along came Betty and Barney. They told family members, a few close friends, and some UFO investigators (including the Air Force) what they consciously remembered of a traumatic experience which had been imposed upon them (they had not asked to be abducted), and they explic- itly requested that their story not be widely publicized. They wanted to live their lives as if the sighting events had not happened. (Their story became public several years later when this confidence was broken by a reporter who, against the Hills’ wishes, published a major article in the Boston Traveler.) This reluctance to publicize their story was unlike the publicity- seeking contactees. What I realized many years later was that their sight- ing report was the beginning of a paradigm shift that became apparent after the publication of Budd Hopkins’s book Missing Time in 1981. By the early 1980s it was obvious that the people who told the stories of involuntary capture by aliens were not just a new form of contactees. Instead, they were involuntary abductees. The difference between the contactees and the abductees could be expressed in the following simple phrase: Contactees have a good time, abductees don’t! (In the last 10 years or so there have been some people who would claim they were taken against their will, but then found that they appreciated the experience. I suppose in the future some people will consider it an honor to have been abducted and some people will actually look forward to abduction.) I was one of the many who did not accept their story as true when I first read it in 1966 or 1967 in The Interrupted Journey (John Fuller, 1966). Foreword b 11 I did not have the good fortune, as did Stanton Friedman, to meet the Hills many times through the years, and of course, I was not privy to any family discussions with the Hills, such as reported by Betty’s niece, Kathy Marden. The information that was available in Fuller’s book and pub- lished in numerous articles over the years did not give a complete ac- count of the sighting events or the impact on the lives of the Hills, and left wiggle room for the skeptics to propose earthly explanations. This book, unlike Fuller’s, contains more than just a history of the Hills’ abduc- tion. It also contains numerous refutations of the explanations offered by the skeptics in the years since Fuller’s book. Information that was left out during the original telling of the story, but available in the hypnosis transcripts and other documents, is now brought forth to confront the proposed explanations. Coauthor Marden is clearly thoroughly familiar with the skeptical arguments as well as with the Hill abduction informa- tion, and she brings forth the refuting information each time she reaches an event that has been “explained.” For example, one of the first explana- tions was by the Air Force Project Blue Book investigator who suggested that the “light” they saw was only a powerful anti-aircraft searchlight on clouds, such as is sometimes used in cities for advertising purposes. This was ridiculous on the face of it, because they were in a rural area where there would be no use for a powerful spotlight. But also, there were hardly any clouds to shine the beam on. And, of course, they would have recog- nized it as a searchlight because they could have seen the glowing line made by the light beam going up to the clouds. Furthermore, a search- light on clouds couldn’t explain any of the numerous motions and other things the Hills described about the “light” they saw. Another proposed explanation was that the Hills failed to identify a planet that appeared near the moon, and for some reason this caused them to panic and turn off the main road. This silly explanation is com- pletely contradicted by the dynamics of the object in the sighting: It re- peatedly moved back and forth, up and down, with large changes in sighting direction, and even crossed the face of the moon. Barney reported that through binoculars, while standing beside the car (before the abduction), he could see “people” inside the “light,” and at one time these people seemed to be looking out through windows at him. It is well known that, even with binoculars, a planet does not appear to be windows with people looking out! Much of the detailed descriptions of the events during the abduction were obtained during hypnosis sessions conducted by Dr. Benjamin Simon. 12 b Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience The skeptics have given Simon high marks for proposing a “logical” ex- planation for the abduction story: The various events during the abduc- tion were all nightmares that Betty vocalized while sleeping, and Barney picked up on them and took them in as real events that had happened to him. (Simon was less certain about explaining the initial and final por- tions of the event that were consciously recalled in the days, weeks, and months before the hypnosis sessions began.) Of course, this does not ex- plain how Barney’s story could diverge considerably from Betty’s, as it does in many places. Nevertheless, the skeptics did not criticize Simon when he tried to lead the witnesses into believing that his explanation was correct.