The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: A Betrayal of Trust
Ironically, just as Barney and Betty were seeing a light at the end of a tunnel that they never intended to enter, a dark shroud was thrown over them. In August, their friend Adele Darrah informed them that John Luttrell, a reporter for a Boston newspaper, had interviewed her. She remarked that he seemed to think that Pease Air Force Base had paid for their sessions with Dr. Simon, and had then sworn the Hills to secrecy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Betty wrote to NICAP’s Walter Webb, “I guess he [Luttrell] has discussed us with everyone we have ever met in Massachusetts. But we have decided that we are NOT going to be involved in his story. He told Adele that he was assigned by his editor two months ago to do a story on us. We are letting people know that we do not want the story published.”
In a phone call to Barney, Luttrell revealed that he knew most of the personal facts about their lives and requested an appointment to discuss the article with them. Betty wrote in her memoirs, “We told him that we would not be home on that date, and asked if he thought our experience might be published. If so, we objected to this. I told him that I might lose my job as a child welfare worker with the State of New Hampshire, if he published this. We were fearful of how it might affect our lives. We made our position known that we did not want our experience to be published. Later, we learned that the reporter came to our house and sat on our front steps.” However, he was disappointed to find that after a sweltering ride and a 90-minute wait at their doorstep, the Hills failed to appear. Despite the Hills’ adamant objection to his article, he remained persistent. In a letter dated August 19, 1965, Luttrell wrote, “I am endowed with enough determination to try it again and wondered whether we could get together at your convenience sometime on Sunday, August 22? Mean- while, I’ve been talking with “Lorry” Dallassandro in Weymouth, and if the Hills prove to be anywhere as nice as she describes, meeting both of you will indeed be a pleasure. She thinks exceptionally highly of both of you and she, too, agrees that your experience is perhaps one of the most significant ever to occur anywhere.” The Hills were not as “nice” as Lauri assumed they would be, when it involved the invasion of their privacy and the dissemination of confidential information pertaining to their lives. But Luttrell attempted to reassure them by writing, “Rest assured that my motives lie only in the realm of information, and I have no intention of commercializing upon what’s happened to the Hills.” The Hills did not bite. Instead, Barney contacted two lawyers in an attempt to force the reporter, the publisher, and the editor to cease and desist. To his great displeasure, the lawyers informed Barney that as long as medical confidentiality was not violated and the story was treated as a news item, they could not legally bar its publication.
Betty wrote to Walter Webb, “I do not know what effect publicity would have on Barney’s position in so many of the things he is doing. There is a possibility that he might be appointed to the State’s Human Rights Commission which is being set up here; and he has just been appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and he is director of the board of directors of the Poverty Program, and several other things.” Clearly, any association with the lunatic fringe would destroy his credibility in the public eye. As a testament to NICAP Investigator Walter Webb’s professionalism and personal integrity, he refused all of Luttrell’s requests for an in-depth interview about the Hills.
When the article did not appear in September’s Boston Traveler, Betty and Barney breathed a sigh of relief. They thought that they had success- fully warded off this living nightmare. What they didn’t know was that Luttrell had an audiotaped copy of their confidential talk to members of the Two State UFO Study Group. Nor did they know that friends and NICAP members were violating confidentiality by discussing their hypnosis sessions with a newspaper reporter. Further, they did not know that Luttrell had discussed their case with Air Force officers at Pease, and had obtained a copy of their Blue Book file. Then, Luttrell had surreptitiously, and without Walter Webb’s knowledge, acquired a copy of his confidential “Final Report” on the Hill case dated August 30, 1965. Unknowingly, they had been betrayed on many levels. Perhaps those who betrayed them had been deceived by Luttrell, just as he had attempted to deceive the Hills.
Their greatest fear was realized on Monday, October 25, 1965, when in the middle of the night, Barney received phone calls from Europe about his UFO experience. He phoned Captain Ben Swett at Pease Air Force Base at 4 a.m. with panic in his voice, stating that an unscrupulous reporter had publicized his confidential information. Later, he found him- self surrounded by the media outside the Portsmouth Post Office. Some- one thrust the front page of the Boston Traveler toward his face, revealing the Headline, “UFO Chiller—Did They Seize Couple?” John Luttrell had succeeded in committing the ultimate betrayal by ignoring the Hills’ repeated requests for confidentiality. His series of articles constituted a gross intrusion into the Hills’ private, personal lives. He could not have succeeded without the collusion of Betty’s close friends in whom she confided the details of her hypnotic material. This was an unforgivable violation of confidentiality by members of a UFO research organization.
It forever plunged Betty and Barney into the public eye, a fate that they sought to avoid. It opened them up to public criticism, stereotyping, arm- chair psychoanalysis, and forever condemned them to a position within the lunatic fringe. Their prior accomplishments, their outstanding achievements in the community, and their personal stability and integrity suddenly dissolved in the eyes of those who sought to discredit them. They suddenly were thrust into the realm of the incredible.
Luttrell and his newspaper had commercialized their plight and sent them into a tailspin. The media surrounded their home, filled their front hall, and hounded them with telephone calls. When Betty arrived home, she wondered if one of the neighbors was having a dinner party, for cars were parked all around the house. She opened the front door and walked in to find herself surrounded by the media. She reminisced, “I asked Barney, ‘What is happening?’ He told me he was talking with someone from London. Someone handed the newspaper to me, and I saw the head- lines. I took the newspaper and locked myself in the bathroom. I was stunned, unbelieving. I noted it was going to be a series to run for five days. When we were asked for our comments, we said that we needed to wait until we had read all of the series.” “In the midst of all of the calls, we received one from a friend stationed at Pease, who offered us dinner and sanctuary from the press. So at about 8 p.m. we excused ourselves and went to Pease Air Force Base, to Captain Ben Swett’s house for dinner. Friends at the base joined us, and I will always remember that we found sanctuary that night at an Air Force Base with Air Force personnel.”
When Betty arrived at the New Hampshire Division of Welfare Office the next morning, the press greeted her at the door. They wanted to photograph her at work, but fortunately for her, the State Office denied permission on the grounds that her private affairs were separate from her professional employment. However, when she and Barney ar- rived home, the press was back and their phone was ringing nonstop. They fled the premises and sought privacy in a local restaurant but were soon besieged by autograph seekers. The Hills were amazed that anyone would want their signature. Two months earlier in a letter to Walter Webb, Betty had expressed the concern that “people would question my sanity and I would probably have to carry a certified statement from Dr. Simon testifying to the fact that I was safe enough to associate with the rest of the world’s population!”
The following evening, Betty and Barney traveled to Kingston to ensure that the relatives knew and understood their position about publicity. They had decided that they would publicly discuss the UFO sighting, but refused to talk about their capture and hypnotic recall. It was such a long and complex story; they doubted that they could explain it adequately. Additionally, the sighting itself would have to be accepted before they could expect anyone to consider the possibility of an abduction.
That night at 9:45, as they were leaving Betty’s parents’ home, they saw a red-orange bouncing light directly in front of their vehicle, about 200 yards back from the highway. It traveled over a nearby pond, across an adjacent field, and south over the treetops. Its flight pattern was erratic. The craft seemed to follow the contours of the treetops, ascending over taller trees and descending over shorter ones, exactly as a similar craft had traveled in September of 1961. Barney braked the car and flashed the headlights to signal the craft; then he opened the door to light the car’s interior. In response, the craft stopped and rocked back and forth as it descended behind a heavily forested area. The Hills turned their car around, picked up their relatives, and headed down a side road, attempting to approach the craft for a closer look. However, it had disappeared into an inaccessible area of deep swampland. They decided not to at- tempt to approach it on foot, but to return to the family home to study a topographical map of the area. This would be the first of many subsequent sightings, and the Hills wondered if their captors had somehow learned that their capture had been made public.
The public response to Luttrell’s newspaper articles was overwhelmingly positive, and New Hampshire’s citizens were clamoring for more information. The Boston Traveler sold the greatest number of newspaper copies in 84 years of publication, and there were 3,000 requests for re- prints of the articles. Requests for additional information were beginning to snowball, so the Hills agreed to speak publicly, for the first time, at a forum at the Pierce Memorial Unitarian-Universalist Church in neigh- boring Dover, New Hampshire. Betty and Barney were anxious to mitigate some of the sensationalism perpetrated by Luttrell’s newspaper columns. On Sunday evening, November 7, people from as far as 40 miles away stood in the frigid, penetrating rain only to be turned away from an overcrowded church. All 400 seats were filled and a loud- speaker was hastily improvised to accommodate an overflow crowd in the basement and hallways. Many of Betty and Barney’s friends, including Captain Ben Swett and his wife Wyn, Walter Webb, Lauri D’Allessandro, Adele Darrah, Admiral Herbert Knowles, and his wife Helen were in the audience. Author, play- wright, and distinguished columnist for The Saturday Review, John Fuller had driven up from Connecticut with an NBC cameraman and radiomen. He introduced himself to Captain Swett in the church basement. After talking with him and liking what he said about his factual approach to such subjects, Swett led Fuller upstairs and introduced him to Barney.
Lieutenant Alan Brandt, the public information officer from Pease Air Force Base, in uniform, addressed the crowd from the podium. He reviewed the official Air Force policy on UFOs, indicating that UFO sightings were taken seriously and should be reported to the base, immediately. Next, the Hills spoke, in a way John Fuller described as “circumspectly” about their experience. They emphasized that they could only attest to the veracity of their conscious memory of a close encounter with an unconventional craft in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Barney explained that the publicity surrounding their case had been published without their consent or cooperation, that they had hoped to maintain confidentiality about their experience—particularly the hypno- sis sessions.