Unwilling Trailblazers
During the first thirty years of the world’s intense postwar interest in UFOs, the objects themselves absorbed the attention of most researchers and laypersons. But UFO investigation grew circular, going round and round with the same syllabus of sightings, close encounters, and unacceptable official explanations.
Alien abduction was a longtime staple of pulp and Hollywood science fiction; in 1955’s This Island Earth, for example, a small plane carrying prominent Earth scientists is held immobile by a green ray and then pulled up through the underside hatch of an enormous flying saucer. The Hills’ account, though, suggested credibility, and coverage by major national magazines turned it from a fringe story into a mainstream one.
By the 1980s, restless UFO investigators had shifted much of their attention to abductions, looking hard at alien life forms, kidnapping, sexual assault, lost time —even vats filled with body parts (the 1980 New Mexico abduction of a woman named Myra Hansen and her young son). Years later, during the 1993–2002 TV run of The X-Files, alien abduction drove many episodes, and was a vital aspect of the backstory of one of the lead characters, FBI investigator Fox Mulder. (The abduction theme returned in a short-form X-Files reboot broadcast in 2016.) If not for Barney and Betty Hill, agent Mulder may never have existed.
In 1961, the Hills had no cultural pillars to lean against. So disturbed were they by their 1961 experience, and so confused by their fragmented memories of it, that their anxiety progressed to nightmares and pure misery. As is well known, details of the couple’s experience came out under hypnosis. Nothing in Barney or Betty’s behavior suggests opportunism or a hoax, or any untoward eagerness to go public, particularly because the Hills endured their emotional upset privately for nearly thirty months. Finally, in February 1964, Barney Hill agreed to interviews and hypnotic-regression sessions with Boston psychiatrist and neurologist Benjamin Simon. A week later, Betty Hill did the same. The sessions were tape recorded. Blue Book’s scientific consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, participated in the sessions, though he was not doing so under the aegis of the Air Force.
Of the two, Betty was the most voluble, and although both Hills recounted their stories under hypnosis, some observers questioned the depth of Barney’s recollections, and wondered if he simply modeled his story on Betty’s. (In 1997, Betty Hill wrote to UFO researcher Ted Bloecher, to express misgivings about the regression sessions and question the integrity of hypnosis. She was particularly concerned that too many witnesses to “fairly good” UFO events fell in with regression therapists who coaxed false memories, and were thus transformed from witnesses into abductees.) As the regression sessions continued, the Hills revealed that as the craft kept pace with them, Barney suddenly veered from the highway and onto a side road.
He could not recall whether he made the turn of his own volition or if he felt commanded to do so. In any case, he brought the car to a stop. The Hills were physically removed from the car by two humanoids and wrestled into the craft.
In separate rooms, Barney and Betty were physically examined. A needle was inserted into Betty’s navel—a pregnancy test, one of the aliens told her. (Betty was able to make herself understood in English, and received thoughts that her brain interpreted as English. Barney had no experience of language, only what he called “a humming.”) An artist named David Baker sat in on the second Simon-Hynek hypnosis session with Barney Hill. After the interview, Baker prepared pencil or charcoal renderings of the aliens’ heads, as Barney had described them. The carefully shaded sketches suggest a mug-shot set, with a left profile and a full-face view.
The profile image is hardly a profile at all, for the alien’s nose is defined only by a nostril; the nose has neither bridge nor tip. The forehead slopes back sharply above the eyes. No obvious hearing aperture is visible, though Baker’s sketch incorporates a shadowed area in the spot where humans’ ears are located. The jaw is long and, from the side, heavy. Full-face, the width of high cheekbones is maintained into the upper jaw; the jaw narrows sharply below the mouth, and the chin tapers to a point. Full on, the creature’s very large, apparently lidless eyes are sited at the extremes of the face, giving an aspect that is at once comforting (the eyes of human babies and baby animals are large relative to their faces, and are often wide-set) and disconcerting.
The nose is comprised of two short, vertical slits. The small, open mouth is without lips. The relative height of the forehead appears slightly greater than human.
Where did the Hills’ abductors come from? Under hypnosis, Betty Hill sketched a rough star map (linked to existing star patterns by later research of Marjorie Fish), crisscrossed with solid lines indicating what the alien leader referred to as “trade routes”; broken lines in Betty’s drawing showed various, far-flung expeditions across space. The star map encouraged astronomical researchers to prepare polished versions of Betty’s drawing. The conclusion of some is that the craft encountered by the Hills originated in Zeta Reticuli, a shorthand way of referring to twin stars Zeta 1 Reticuli and Zeta 2 Reticuli. We have already discussed the great distances separating Earth from other stars, and the Zetas are far away indeed: 220 trillion miles. A light year is the time needed for light to travel about six trillion miles, which places the Zeta twins 35.7 light years away.
Because the present conception of light years is unavoidably a human one, its presumed obstacles to practical travel between stars reflects human technological capabilities. If the Hills’ aliens originated near Zeta 1 or Zeta 2, the visitors managed the trip with a propulsion system that is, at present, impossible for human beings to duplicate.