The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: A Glimpse Into the Lives of Betty and Barney Hill
When Betty and Barney Hill planned their impromptu “honeymoon” trip to Niagara Falls in mid-September, 1961, they were fulfilling the final stage of their marriage commitment and seeking a relaxing and intimate, albeit short, vacation. Although they had married on May 12, almost 16 months earlier, time and distance had obstructed their mutual goal to spend time together. Betty, with a chuckle, once told me that she had never intended to marry Barney.
It had nothing to do with the fact that he was black. In all probability he proposed to her because he’d grown tired of the drive from Philadelphia to Portsmouth. They had planned to “just be friends.” But as they spent more and more time together, they began to change their minds. What had been a friendship developed into a strong, loving bond, and they were married in Camden, New Jersey, on May 12, 1960. However, job commitments forced them to remain apart for the next 10 months. Betty, a social worker for the State of New Hampshire, made her home in Portsmouth, while Barney, a city carrier for the U.S.
Post Office, resided in Philadelphia. The long-awaited job transfer from Philadelphia to a location closer to Betty had come through on March 17 of that year. The job offer was in Boston, a 60-mile commute each way, and Barney would be required to work the graveyard shift—a huge sacrifice and major adjustment. However, his desire to be with his wife, if only for a few hours a day, spurred Barney on, and he decided to accept the new position.
The couple had met five years earlier in the summer of 1956, when Barney, his then wife, and their two children vacationed at the home of mutual friends. Formerly from Philadelphia, their friends ran a boarding house where Betty had rented a room while her own home was being moved and remodeled into apartments. For many years, New Hampshire’s beaches had enticed the Hill family to flee from the sweltering summer city heat to the warm sands and brisk breezes along Hampton Beach.
Although their encounter was brief and formal, the Hills exchanged addresses with Betty and they occasionally corresponded. As a precursor to her return to college for a degree in social work at the University of New Hampshire, Betty was working as a cashier and hostess at a favorite beach lunch spot.
Her summer employment would help to cover her college tuition and purchase her books. She told the coauthor, Kathy, that she enjoyed the Hills but had little time to spend with them because she was working from 11 a.m. until 8 p.m. seven days a week. The Hills expressed an interest in renting a room at her home on a later vacation, if one was available on a short- term basis.
Early the following year, when Barney and his wife separated, he contacted Betty, and soon their friendship developed into a romantic relationship. They spent long weekends and vacation time in each other’s company, sharing common interests, a keen intellectual bond, and a sense of adventure. One weekend, Betty’s parents invited her to dinner, and she took Barney along to meet the family. Soon, she introduced him to her extended family, and all but a couple of racially prejudiced individuals took an immediate liking to him.
From Kathy’s perspective, as a young adolescent, it seemed that assimilation into her family was an easy process for Barney. He was kind, gregarious, genteel, and well-informed about the social and political issues of the day. The Barrett family was politically involved, and they enjoyed others who shared their common inter- est. This made for many hours of interesting conversation, spirited debate, and cheerful commiseration. Betty and waitresses of Rudy’s Farm Kitchen in Hampton, summer of 1938. Courtesy of Kathleen Marden.
Betty, also a divorcée, had struck out on her own after 14 years of marriage. She had met her first husband during the summer after her sophomore year at UNH, when a prolonged bout with an abdominal infection had prevented her from returning to college. After a period of recuperation, she worked as a waitress at Rudy’s Farm Kitchen, a restaurant in Hampton, N.H. Full-course dinners were served for the price of $1. That is where she met Bob, a young, divorced chef to whose warm personality she was immediately attracted. In a taped interview with Kathy she stated, “Bob Stewart seemed like the best thing on the horizon, so I grabbed him.
Either you went to college or you got married, so I got married. I thought he was a pretty good guy, frankly, and it took me years to find out different. These were the days when most people didn’t even have jobs. We were coming out of the depression. He was hard-working, and anything that I wanted he got for me.” They were married on June 7, 1941, in a small ceremony at the town hall in Alton, N.H. Betty’s parents gave them their blessings and stood up for them.
Shortly after she married her first husband, his three biological children were put in her custodial care, a completely unforeseen event. Betty and Bob had intended to support them and to see them during weekend visitations, but a turn of events necessitated a change. Their biological mother had remarried and just given birth to twins. Betty said that “when she found out that Bob had remarried she picked up the three kids and dumped them at Bob’s mother’s house.” Bob’s mother found that she was incapable of caring for three children under the age of 8. So Betty and Bob took them in, and three years later, Betty legally adopted them.
Bob transferred to a higher-paying job as a machinist at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and Betty started a full-time job as a mother and home- maker. She said that she found the job extremely challenging, but she adjusted to her new circumstance and made the best of it. She nurtured them through their formative years, and as they gained their independence, she followed suit. Tired of Bob’s philandering, she decided he would be happier with his girlfriend, and she would be better off alone.
She purchased her new home with the settlement from her divorce and worked for a time at the W.T. Grant Company, a local department store. Then the Gulf Oil Company approached Betty with an offer for the sale of her house. At a meeting at a downtown restaurant with her real estate agent, Charlie Gray, and the oil company representative, Betty struck a heavily negotiated deal for a good sum of money—at least double the initial offer. Later, when she inquired about the fate of her house, the company informed her that they planned to demolish it. In turn, she offered them a dollar for it on the condition that she would move it to a different lot.
When they accepted her offer, she had to find land close to the original location. With the help of her real estate agent she purchased a large vacant lot on a nearby corner. But before she could move the house to it, a new foundation and utilities had to be installed, and she had to find a temporary dwelling. This is when she moved into the boarding house where she met Barney. The profit from the sale of her land made it financially possible for Betty to return to college to finish her baccalaureate degree.