You and your partner decide to take a little road trip with your dog in tow.
It's been a long couple weeks and you've been tired and sick lately,
so just a few days to refresh and see the sights.
You have a nice relaxing time, but all vacations have to end.
The drive home is 6 hours along plenty of wooded country roads.
It's already getting late, but luckily, it's a clear night
and you can see all the stars in the sky.
Halfway through the journey home, around 10:30PM,
you decide your dog needs to go to the bathroom.
One of the stars you had been looking at has been getting bigger, seeming to get closer.
With the binoculars you keep in the car,
you and your partner realize it's not a star.
It's not a plane either.
In fact, it's something you've never seen before.
Getting back inside the car, you decide to follow the light for a bit and see what happens.
You watch as it descends and rises,
coming close to buildings and trees,
making quick turns without a single sound, until finally—terrifyingly—
it's right in front of you, just a few meters from the ground.
A sense of dread fills you as you step out of the vehicle.
It's a strange hovering craft, and inside you can see people, who take note of you.
A shrill noise fills your ears,
and the next thing you know, you're back in the car driving again.
It's nearly 3AM now, and somehow you've only traveled another 35 miles.
This is the story of Barney and Betty Hill—the first widely publicized alien abduction case.
On the night of September 19, 1961,
Barney and Betty Hill were returning from vacation to Niagara Falls and Montreal
to their home in New Hampshire when they spotted a strange light in the sky.
During their first stop, Betty thought it was a planet she wasn't familiar with;
Barney thought it was a plane.
Betty, with her binoculars, observed an "odd-shaped" craft with multi-colored lights.
The craft suddenly began to move erratically and they both knew it was neither a planet nor a plane.
The second time they stopped the car, Barney had a pistol in his pocket.
With the binoculars, he saw 8-11 humanoid figures wearing black uniforms and caps through the windows of the craft.
All but one of them moved to the back of the craft to some sort of panel.
The remaining observer spoke to him telepathically, telling him to "stay where you are and keep looking."
Frantically, he ran back to the car and witnessed the object shoot upwards and stay hovering above them.
He drove away quickly, yelling, "They're going to capture us!"
and telling Betty to watch for the craft out the window.
Within seconds, the car was filled with buzzing and beeping that seemed to shake and vibrate their entire bodies.
From there, their memories became hazy.
As quickly as it began, the buzzing stopped and they were returned to normal,
having now lost several hours of time.
They arrived home at dawn, but some things were off—
strange feelings and unexplained occurrences abounded.
Their watches had stopped working;
the leather strap of the binoculars was broken;
Barney's nicest dress shoes were scuffed.
And after placing her dress and shoes from that night into her closet,
Betty discovered that not only had her dress been torn in several places,
but there was a strange pink powder on it.
On the trunk of their car, they noticed strange concentric circles that caused the needle of a compass to spin wildly.
Ten days after the encounter, Betty began to have strange and vivid dreams
that seemed to collectively detail the events of that night.
She dreamed that as they took off in their car, they made a sharp turn and hit a roadblock.
A group of men surrounded the car,
and she noted they were only 5 to 5 and a half feet tall, wearing blue uniforms with caps.
They had grey skin and bluish lips with black hair and eyes.
They ushered the couple into the forest whereupon they walked up a ramp and into the strange metallic disc-shaped craft.
Inside, Betty was separated from her husband,
and she was told by one she called the Leader they would be examined separately.
The Examiner, as she called another, inspected her hands, mouth, teeth, eyes, and ears;
collecting skin, hair, and fingernail samples.
At one point, the Examiner inserted a probe into her navel, causing extreme pain.
As for Barney, she thought he was unconscious for his examination.
Betty recounted that the beings were interested most in Barney's teeth.
He had lost his teeth during World War II and wore dentures—
something that greatly intrigued them.
Once the Examiner had finished the tests and left, Betty had a conversation with the Leader.
He showed her a book with strange symbols in it as well as a map of a star system describing where they had come from.
In the end, she wasn't allowed to keep the book nor remember anything about the encounter at all.
The couple was taken back to their car and watched as the beings departed in their craft.
It was then they would resume their drive home.
All of this unfolded over five nights and only five nights.
Betty wouldn't have these dreams again.
Soon after, Betty would get in touch with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon, or NICAP.
A man named Walter Webb would go on to interview the couple for six hours.
This was followed two months later by another interview with NICAP
in which the idea of hypnosis was brought up with the couple,
though a formal session wouldn't occur for another two years.
Between January and June of 1964, the Hills met with Dr. Benjamin Simon,
who would hypnotize them in separate sessions.
Barney recounted a story much like Betty's dreams.
He recalled breaking the strap on his binoculars as he ran back to the car,
which he felt compelled to drive off the road into the woods.
He recalled seeing men stopping them and leading them into the craft.
Though he said he felt entranced by the men, he also stated that he kept his eyes closed most of the time.
They were separated inside the craft and the men performed an examination on Barney,
collecting samples from various sites on his body.
And while he heard them speak to each other in strange mumbling noises,
he said that when they spoke to him, their mouths didn't move and they spoke to him in English.
Telepathy wasn't a word he was familiar with, but he called it "thought transference".
Betty's hypnosis sessions revealed a story very similar to her dreams as well,
though there were some changes in the descriptions of the men and the order of events during the missing time.
Dr. Simon suggested that Betty could sketch the star map she saw, which she now said was a three-dimensional projection.
She took a sheet of paper and drew the stars she could remember,
as well as a series of lines that indicated whether a star was on a trade route or a less visited site.
In fact, both of them ended up making sketches illustrating their experience.
In the end, Dr. Simon thought the encounter was made up and Barney's recollections were influenced by Betty's dreams,
but the couple disagreed as they were able to detail things that had happened to them individually aboard the craft.
Regardless of the doctor's conclusions, Barney and Betty felt less anxiety about the abduction after the sessions concluded.
Ultimately, though there were numerous interviews and case studies conducted on the pair,
they never sought fame or publicity themselves.
And unfortunately, no extraordinary claim is met without skepticism.
People noted that the pair—an interracial couple in the 1960s—faced a lot of stress and anxiety.
Along with sleep deprivation and mistaking beacons and ordinary lights for floating space crafts,
all this pointed to a dreamt up story.
After the hypnosis sessions had already begun,
an episode of The Outer Limits aired that featured an alien.
Two weeks later, under hypnosis, Barney would sketch a similar image,
though he and Betty claimed to have never seen the show.
Still, despite all this, they had and continue to have their supporters.
In 1966, a book titled Interrupted Journey was written by John G. Fuller,
which looked in depth at the missing time the pair experienced.
The book would later be adapted into a television movie in 1975 called "The UFO Incident"
starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons.
In 1968, a woman named Marjorie Fish corroborated the star map that Betty drew,
but this was based on flawed scientific data.
And 50 years after the initial incident,
a marker was set up by the state of New Hampshire along Highway 3 to commemorate that fateful night.
Barney Hill eventually passed away on February 25, 1969 at the age of 46.
Betty Hill never remarried
and continued to tell the public about what she experienced until she died 35 years after her husband on October 17, 2004.
She was 85.
It's undeniable that their story led to further claims of abductions—
the retelling of little gray aliens comes directly from them.
In the end, what happened to the Hills serves as a reminder
that the truth may not always be what any one person believes.
Thanks for letting me abduct you on this journey.
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