I was very young when I saw the made-for-TV movie, The UFO Incident, which starred Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones. The scene where Jones was hypnotized continues to haunt me to this day. Since then, I’ve read several books about UFO abduction cases and am in the middle of reading this latest book, Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. The following is an interview with Kathleen Marden, niece of Betty Hill and co-author of Captured.

1. Why did you decide to write Captured!, when the Betty and Barney Hill 1961, UFO abduction has been mentioned in so many books and articles?

Actually, up until this year only one book has provided the reader with a fairly complete and accurate account of the Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. That was The Interrupted Journey by John Fuller, a New York Times best-seller released in 1966. It focused primarily upon the Hills’ close encounter with an unconventional craft in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, their amnesia in conjunction with a period of missing time, and the hypnosis sessions with neurologist/psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, whose excellent reputation was built upon his success in the treatment of amnesia and conversion hysteria through the use of hypnosis.

Subsequently, over a period that spanned forty years, other books and articles addressed various issues in the Hill case. However, too often, accurate detailed information was omitted and replaced by false and misleading propaganda released by so-called skeptical writers. This misinformation, or some would call it disinformation, has been blindly accepted by many scientists and members of the mainstream media who have been deceived by debunkers who do their research by proclamation, not investigation.

To add to the muddied waters, over time, Betty’s memory of the UFO experience morphed as a result of the normal adaptive process that is characteristic of one’s recall of events long ago. This misinformation, unwittingly disseminated by Betty, has been published in recent years contributing to the creation of a modern myth.

My decision to write Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience was made, in part, due to the vast amount of solid, accurate, scientific research conducted by early investigators such as NICAP’s Walter Webb. Additionally, I found hundreds if not thousands of pages of letters, diary entries, memoirs, technical reports and scientific research meticulously done on the case. Most of this information has never been released to the public.

Then, in 1996, I hit pay dirt when Betty gave me a copy of the audiotapes of Barney’s and her separate hypnosis sessions with Dr. Benjamin Simon. I transcribed the tapes for comparative analysis, and when I examined the Hills’ individual testimony; I discovered that an abundance of information had never been made public. John Fuller had included the more emotionally charged excerpts of the Hills ’ hypnosis sessions in the Interrupted Journey, but often they were a combination of accurate and inaccurate information. I discovered that Dr. Simon had asked Betty and Barney the same questions 2, 3, 4, or even 5 times. With each new query about a specific event Dr. Simon was able to elicit more accurate information than he had during the emotionally charged sessions. It was only in the retelling of the event over and over again that an accurate and consistent picture emerged, and that story has never been told.

In order to confirm or refute Dr. Simon’s hypothesis that Barney had absorbed Betty’s dream material I conducted a comparative analysis of the hypnosis transcripts versus her five page “Dreams or Recall?” paper written in November, 1961. Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience provides the reader with a fresh look at all of the never before revealed information pertaining to the Hill case and it examines old information in a new context.

2. What were the Hills doing on the night they encountered a UFO? Briefly describe what they saw? What made it unusual?

Betty and Barney were returning home from an extended weekend vacation in Niagara Falls and Canada. They had planned to spend the night in Montreal, but as they were searching for a motel on the outskirts of the city, Barney decided to drive on to New Hampshire. At some point along the route they heard that a hurricane was coming up the coast, so they felt it was important to arrive home before the hurricane hit. This meant that Barney would have to drive during the night. But they agreed that if he became tired they would stop at a motel.

He’d had a good night’s sleep the previous night and a pleasant day in Montreal. Because he felt refreshed and energetic he continued to drive on through New Hampshire’s Wilderness and White Mountain regions. In the Groveton/Lancaster area Betty spotted what at first glance appeared to be a satellite or a shooting star, only it shot upward. As she watched it, the perplexing light increased in size and seemed to slowly descend in her direction. Finally she told Barney about her observation and requested that he stop the car for a closer look.

Just south of Twin Mountain, through binoculars she observed its unconventional appearance as it passed in front of the moon flashing long points of multicolored light. When Barney viewed it through binoculars it reminded him of a large aircraft coming in for a landing, only it was silent. Returning to their vehicle they traveled on through the 10 miles or so of Franconia Notch, a narrow cut through the mountains. Over the next several minutes, the object descended to a position just above the mountaintops; and sometimes it dropped down in front of or behind the mountain peaks.

Barney halted the car momentarily from time to time to get a better look at the enigmatic craft, and once, pulled to the side of the road for an unencumbered observation. It was then that he was able to notice the stair-step flight pattern—the rotation—the blue-white lights—and the fact that it was completely silent, although it descended to approximately 1000 feet. Betty’s description was identical to Barney’s, allowing for individual differences in phraseology.

Then, only three miles south of the Franconia Notch the object suddenly stopped spinning and shifted ahead of Betty and Barney. Barney stopped the car directly in the middle of the road and jumped out to look at the craft. The elliptical object was now hovering only 80-100 feet above the car and a red right parted from each side of it. Almost immediately, it left its position and in a gliding motion, it shifted to an adjacent field. Fascinated, Barney walked toward it and through his binoculars observed 8-11 humanoid figures peering down at him.

Suddenly, with military precision, all but one moved toward what Barney thought was a control panel. Next, short bat-like wings began to slide out of each end of the craft and something dropped down through its bottom. At that moment, the figure in the window communicated a frightening message to Barney to stay there and just keep looking. He seemed to be losing the ability to carry out self initiated action and this loss of control frightened him immensely. But he managed to pull the binoculars down from his eyes, breaking the strap in the process, and flee toward his vehicle where Betty awaited his return. Hysterically laughing or weeping (Betty couldn’t determine which it was), Barney informed her that they were going to be captured. Barney shifted into first gear and hit the accelerator. As he sped down U.S. Route 3 the object, which had glided overhead, seemed to emit a series of code-like buzzing or electrical beeping sounds that caused the car to vibrate.

Soon, the object seemed to have left the area and the Hills continued along their route home to Portsmouth. However, without explanation Barney suddenly made a sharp left turn over a steel frame bridge twelve miles south of the field. He drove along NH State Highway 175 for approximately four miles before turning back toward U.S. Route 3 toward Plymouth and Ashland. Near Ashland, as far as they could recall, they observed a fiery red-orange orb behind a stand of trees. Next, they heard another series of buzzing/beeping sounds. Barney stopped the car and drove from side to side in a futile attempt to reproduce the enigmatic sounds. Betty asked Barney, “Now do you believe in flying saucers?” And he, being a confirmed skeptic and unwilling to admit that he had observed one at close range replied, “Don’t be ridiculous. That wasn’t a flying saucer.”

Their arrival home was a little later than they had anticipated, even allowing for slow driving and stops during the period of observation. Later that day they reported their UFO encounter to Betty’s family and Pease Air Force Base. A formal Air Intelligence report was made on 9/21/1961.

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The following article was printed with permission by the author of Captured! The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction, The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. I’ll be reading and posting a review of this book within the next several weeks. Also, co-author Kathleen Marden (niece of Betty Hill) agreed to do an interview with me for Paranormal Watch. That will be coming soon. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this article.

It is not usually easy to validate claims made by UFO witnesses, and it is especially difficult in those cases in which an abduction seems to have taken place. The real complication occurs when hypnosis is used to investigate missing time in conjunction with the abduction.

In the case of the very well-known abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, many individual hypnosis sessions were conducted three years later by Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist with a long history of using medical hypnosis to recover repressed memories of traumatic experiences, especially those that occurred on the battlefield during World War II. Simon knew nothing about UFOs, yet felt it was his duty to elicit details from Betty and Barney under very deep hypnosis to try to determine what happened during their encounter with a strange space vehicle and eleven alien beings.

Following the pent up emotion released by the Hills while in their separate hypnotic states, Simon induced amnesia in each of them in order to prevent them from discussing what they were beginning to recall. This allowed for careful cross comparison between their distinct accounts.

One key validating revelation was Betty’s conversation with an alien about a three-dimensional model or map (probably a hologram) that was shown to her after she asked where they were from. There was a pattern of a dozen or so lights (stars) connected with three types of lines indicating heavy trade routes, light trade routes and occasional expeditions. Betty knew little of astronomy and was unable to explain where she was in the model. Simon instructed her to draw it after she indicated she could remember what it looked like. The drawing was subsequently included by John G. Fuller in his best-selling book, The Interrupted Journey.

At first there seemed to be no way to determine if the map had any meaning. After all, our galaxy, the Milky Way, has at least two hundred billion stars. Fortunately, a brilliant woman, Marjorie Fish, visited Betty to get more details about the map, in spite of fact that Fish was dubious about the Hills’ assertion that the alien beings were humanoid. Nonetheless, over a period of a few years and more interviews with Betty, Fish built about twenty-six different three-dimensional bead and fishing line models. Her goal was to find a 3-D pattern to match the two-dimensional pattern that Betty had drawn.

I had been favorably impressed by Betty and Barney when we met in Pittsburgh in 1968 and when I read The Interrupted Journey and Fuller’s Look Magazine articles about the Hills. My colleague, Coral Lorenzen, International Director of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization––one of the two major UFO groups at the time––asked me as a scientist to assist Fish in communicating the results of her research. I agreed, and visited her during one of my lecture tours. I also helped her explain her work at a meeting at Adler Planetarium in Chicago and during a presentation at a Mutual UFO Network Symposium in Akron.

Believing Fish to be objective and credible, I published the first article about her work in Saga Magazine and later arranged to interview her and Betty for my documentary film, “UFOs ARE Real.” I also convinced the editor of Astronomy Magazine, Terence Dickinson, to speak with her and to publish an article, “The Zeta Reticuli Incident,” about her work. It ultimately received more response than any article Astronomy had ever published, before or since.

Also appearing in my documentary was a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, Dr. George Mitchell, who had been helpful to Fish in obtaining closely-held star catalogs. He used one of her large models as a teaching tool and testified as to her care and accuracy in constructing the models.

Through her detailed and careful research, she was eventually able to identify all the stars in the pattern, and found that all of the pattern stars were sun-like (notwithstanding that fewer than 5 percent of the stars within 55 light years of the Sun are sun-like). Some stars are too old, too new, too bright, too dim, or vary too much in the intensity of their energy production rate to be sun-like, or they have very close companion stars making it difficult to maintain stable planetary orbits in the vicinity. The pattern stars are also, amazingly enough, in a plane, like slices of pepperoni on a thin pizza rather than spread all about like raisins in a loaf of raisin bread. This makes travel between the stars much easier. The pattern is definitely not coincidental.

And most remarkably, Fish identified the base stars as Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli in the southern sky constellation Reticulum, but only after much better data on the distances to nearby stars was obtained and used to rebuild the models. Nobody building a model before the Hill experience would have obtained the right identification. A unique twosome, Zeta 1 and 2 Reticuli are the closest pair of sun-like stars in our entire local neighborhood. They are only 1/8 of a light year apart from each other, only 39.2 light years away from earth and a billion years older than the sun. These two stars had never been highlighted as special before Fish’s discoveries. It makes sense that they would be the hub of the local neighborhood.

The cosmic perspective for intelligent inhabitants of a planet around Zeta 1 or 2 Reticuli would be very different than that for an Earthling, as the sun is thirty-five times farther away from the nearest star than the distance between Zeta 1 and Zeta 2. We Earthlings are out in the boondocks with no other star close by. However, from a planet orbiting around either of these stars, the other star is visible to the eye all day long, and planets around the other star would be directly observable. No inferences would be necessary. Even with our primitive equipment, at such a close distance we could determine, from the composition of the atmosphere around these planets, if biological activity were present.

Residents of Zeta 1 and 2 would have a much greater incentive to undertake interstellar travel than we have here on Earth. They would also have had much more time for the development of advanced travel technology with their billion year head start on us. Technological progress invariably comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way and we primitives have already determined methods for star travel.

The star map work done by Marjorie Fish was a crucial factor, along with others, in the general acceptance of the Hill story of abduction. Her work was also the target of debunkers and skeptics, including Carl Sagan, who misrepresented Fish’s methods and her results. These attacks along with many others on the Hill case, such as in the TV program, “Cosmos,” are discussed in detail in my book, co-authored by Betty’s niece, Kathleen Marden, Captured!: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction, The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience.

The Sci Fi Channel has announced its plans to launch a new series, called UFO Hunters. Similar to Ghost Hunters, this show will feature New York Strange Phenomena Investigators (NY-SPI). Led by co-founders Oliver Kemenczky and Ted Davis, and supported by researcher/investigator Dennis Anderson, this team will set out to investigate claims of UFO sightings and otherworldly experiences. They will legitimize the examination of evidence by using cutting-edge technology to determine whether claims are fact or fiction.

Stay tuned.

The following is an excerpt of an excellent article, written by Bill Knell about Roswell, entitled “The Roswell UFO Crash Sixty Years Later (1947-2007) - Secrets Yet To Be Revealed.”

Thousands will gather in Roswell, NM, this summer for the annual UFO Festival. Because it’s been sixty years since the UFO crash, this festival will be more important than most. Despite self-serving, ever-changing statements directly or indirectly from the U.S. Government, no one really knows what crashed near Roswell in July of 1947. However, thanks to the courage of individuals that have come forward to speak about what they witnessed or the role they played in the unexplained event, we can be almost certain of one thing. It was, in the words of the late Jesse Marcel Sr., “not of this earth.”

Marcel was an Intelligence Officer at the base and had personal involvement with the investigation of the material from the crash site. He is not alone in his assessment of what crashed near Roswell. The late Retired Colonel Philip Corso offered his own experiences as proof positive in a book entitled ‘The Day after Roswell.’ Shortly after the UFO crash, Corso had an opportunity to view an unusual cadaver preserved in some sort of blue liquid while he was Post Duty Officer at Fort Riley, KS. The body came from Roswell via Fort Bliss and was en route to Wright Field (Wright-Patterson AFB, OH).

It’s important to remember that these are just two of the many people that had first or second hand knowledge about the crash. Even a quick examination of the collective evidence would indicate this event involved something more than a weather, high altitude or radar balloon with a bunch of crash test dummies or cadavers aboard. It was more than some crazy test vehicle that a bunch of super-intelligent children or midgets were piloting around the New Mexico desert during a violent thunderstorm. These facts make the Roswell UFO Festival an essential event that has become an annual reminder of a great mystery that remains unsolved.

There are two sides to the UFO festival. One is fun and involves a carnival, rides, parades, an air show, celebrity speakers and all sorts of events designed to lure families to the otherwise off the beaten path little town. The other is more serious. It’s the opportunity for people to hear UFO investigators and researchers speak about the event or what they might know about aliens, cover-ups and crash retrievals. Past events and trips to the UFO Museum during the festival have provided people with the opportunity to meet some of the surviving witnesses or family members and we assume such opportunities will be made available this time around.

Continue reading The Roswell UFO Crash Sixty Years Later