The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: A Tenuous Diagnosis
Throughout the hypnoanalysis, Dr. Simon faced the daunting task of attempting to separate fantasy from reality. He repeatedly interrogated the Hills for clarity whenever inconsistencies surfaced in their hypnotic recall, attempting to puncture the veracity of their recall. Direct questioning revealed that whenever they appeared to be fabricating information, there was a logical explanation that filled in the apparent discrepancy.
However, as a scientist, Dr. Simon was faced with the task of accepting the reality of an unprecedented UFO abduction, or finding a more ten- able psychoanalytical explanation. If he accepted the Hills’ testimony as real and this information became public, his professional reputation would be at stake.
Dr. Simon must have weighed heavily his responsibility to resolve his patients’ trauma against the acceptance of the factual content of the re- covered memories. If the abduction hypothesis were true, how could he possibly relieve Barney’s fears? The occupants had threatened to take retribution against Barney if he ever revealed information about them. If this abduction had a foundation in reality, how could Barney’s anxiety diminish? On the other hand, if Barney had merely absorbed the content of Betty’s nightmares, due to his empathy for his wife, his anxiety could be relieved, assuming the hypothesis was correct. Yet each time Dr. Simon attempted to puncture the Hills’ recovered memories, he encountered an obstruction. They consistently refuted his conjectures.
He seemed willing to accept the idea that the Hills’ UFO sighting was real, as evidenced by his letter dated March 8, 1965. Betty had informed him that a United Nations representative had contacted her about his own sighting. Dr. Simon replied, “I am not surprised to hear about the UN representative’s interest in these things. They are a fairly universal phenomenon and have been seen in all parts of the world.” In another letter dated December 8, 1966, he contends, “I have steadily held that you probably did have an experience with this sighting.” His stated opinion seems to suggest that, at that time, he accepted the consciously, continuously recalled portions of the UFO encounter as reality.
However, abduction by space aliens was more difficult to accept.
Dr. Simon’s inability to accept the ET hypothesis overshadowed his interpretation of the Hills’ hypnotic material. Therefore, throughout the psychoanalysis, he remained dubious about the value of their preamnesiac conscious memories, and instead focused on Betty’s nightmares. He attempted to convince Barney that he had merely absorbed Betty’s dreams, as evidenced in the following conscious, post-hypnosis interview. The Hills had discussed their memories of being onboard the craft the previous morning at the breakfast table. Barney stated, “Geez, I get the chills.
I get the chills even now. I was telling her I can see it so clearly. This much I have always realized that somewhere…this was prior to coming here for hypnosis…that I had always realized that somehow there was someone stopping us and I never could put any sense to it. In the truthful answer, trying now not to conceal my feelings of being ridiculed, I would say that it is something that happened. But, I put a protective coating on me because I don’t want to be ridiculed.”
When Dr. Simon discussed the possibility that Betty had influenced Barney, he countered this conjecture by stating, “When I was standing out there [in the field] I knew that Betty wasn’t influencing me. What I was thinking is how I would rather not talk about it. Okay, we saw some- thing; now let’s get in our car and drive about our business. This irritated me when she kept saying, ‘Look, its right over there.’ I would slow down and take a peek and see this object still was out there. This greatly irritated me, so I said, ‘What are you trying to do, make me see something that isn’t there?’ Knowing that it was there and not wanting it to be there.
This is why I’ve been confused.” Next, Dr. Simon explored Barney’s perception of the content of two nightmares that Betty had experienced during the previous week. In these terrifying dreams, Betty saw what appeared to be a moon-like object over a body of water, and then a yellow-lighted object that appeared to rapidly depart.
Barney responded:
If this was a dream that she had, it is only an extension of something that I do know and did see. Eliminating the water, from what I’m seeing, this large object was sitting there and then it started moving off and going very rapidly away. This too, I always knew about before hypnosis. But, much of this I wanted to forget very badly.
I always had a fear after this sighting that a great disaster…now how can I explain this disaster…that there was harm that could come to Betty and me by pursuing this…even trying to investigate.
So, I’ve always been the reluctant person. I had been told to forget by these men. I know it wasn’t a dream. This is something that could really serve no purpose, and I have to forget it. “You will forget it. It can only cause great harm that could be meted out to you if you do not forget.” It was the same type of force that I felt in the field that was causing me to come closer, even though I wanted to run away. This was inside of me. I wasn’t creating this power.
When I arrived home in Portsmouth on the same day, I had this feeling of foreboding that something would happen. That Betty…let’s forget this. Let’s forget the portion of even having seen the sighting from Groveton all the way down to Indian Head, because no good can come of it. When I was talking to Walter Webb [in October, 1961] I found that something was very strange about the whole thing. I can go right up to this point and I remember running back to the car. But, just what I had done….I didn’t pursue this any further with Walter Webb because I felt a tremendous pressure…A tremendous pressure to….Let’s drop this thing Betty. You have your report Mr. Webb. Let us forget it and this was the extent of that.
I used to privately think about this. Betty was in the car with me. We were together when she asked me, “What did you see?
What did you see?” I only said, “It’s going to capture us”; I knew that. If you can have an explanation about something that you know is about to happen….I knew if I stayed out there on the highway I would be captured. She just said, “Well, what did you see?” and I didn’t answer her. The next thing I could always remember is seeing this big object sitting in the road. And my first remark was, “Oh God, not again.” Betty was saying, “It’s the moon.” And I said, “Yes, it’s the moon.” We both thought how peculiar it was that the moon was going away and then I didn’t say anything else and she didn’t say anything else. And then what was so surprising is that we weren’t moving. I just wasn’t moving. I’m talking now prior to hypnosis. This is the only way I have ever seen this situation. So, I thought afterwards that the reason I wasn’t moving was because I had apparently brought my car to a halt to negotiate some kind of turn or something. This is why I wasn’t moving, and this I accepted. As we drove on further, Betty remarked to me, “Well, now do you believe in flying saucers?” I said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Betty.”
Was I hallucinating, or in the event of a dream, thinking that it is part of reality? And yet, even if you could answer this question, I basically know that what had happened happened. And this is why I think the whole thing is so ridiculous. What happened happened, and that is why I even hesitate to ask the question, except for reassurance.
Dr. Simon replied, “Well, as I said before, I don’t want to go into any great detail at this time. All these things can happen…anything can hap- pen when you come right down to it. I can reassure you that you have nothing to fear, but I want to reserve a more concrete answer for some- time in the future as we develop this thing more and more into conscious- ness. I’ll begin to work with both of you as you continue to remember the things that came out only under hypnosis. We’ll open up more and more as time goes on. We want to get it into consciousness to the extent that you can tolerate it without anxiety, and this will come.”
As more and more of the hypnotic material penetrated the Hills’ consciousness, Dr. Simon attempted to facilitate the reduction of their stress. However, he remained persistent in his effort to challenge the Hills, suggesting that they had perhaps shared a fantasy; that Betty’s nightmares had been transferred to Barney. The only difference between the hypnotic recall and the dream sequence, he stated, was the ramp at the entrance to the craft. Betty had informed him that, in her dream, she ascended a step or two before she set foot on a ramp. In her hypnotically recovered memory, there was only a ramp, no stairs. But Betty insisted there was so much more than she had spoken to Dr. Simon during the hypnosis sessions. She possessed detailed information not in her dreams that she insisted filled in the missing time and memory gap. Additionally, she pointed out that the men who abducted her were different than she expected. Based upon her dream recall, she expected them to be “cute,” but in her recovered memory they were “sort of grotesque.” Deciding to set aside what the Hills deemed to be apparent inconsistencies between their own interpretations of their hypnosis experience and that of Dr. Simon, they attempted to accept his suggestion. But the acceptance of a fantasy hypothesis was short-lived. Betty recorded in her diary that initially, for a week or two, they felt as if a weight had been lifted from them. But this feeling was short-lived. Almost simultaneously, Betty and Barney realized that they could no longer deceive themselves.
More than anything else, they realized that they “had been touched,” and this feeling unleashed intense emotion in both of them. It became abundantly clear to the Hills that Dr. Simon’s opinion had failed to account for the objective evidence. During the hypnosis, Betty remembered that she had removed her torn dress and placed it in her closet on the morning of September 20, 1961. Subsequently, she had for- gotten it, but during the hypnosis she recalled the struggle that tore the hem and lining and the ineptitude of the leader as he attempted open her zipper. After the hypnosis, she removed the dress from her closet and found that it was blanketed by a mysterious pink powdery substance.
This dress later underwent forensic analysis several times. The Hills were perplexed by Betty’s missing earrings that suddenly reappeared in a bizarre manner. And what had caused the deep scrapes on the tops of Barney’s shoes and the lesions on Barney’s groin? If they were not captured by aliens, then what did happen to them during the missing two hours for which they developed amnesia? The hypnotic regression had supplied the answers to all of these questions, so how could Dr. Simon account for this if the abduction were not real? The Hills were no longer able to find relief in the idea that it was merely a fantasy.
It has been reported by several investigators that Dr. Simon postulated that sexual symbolism could explain some of the content of the Hills’ hypnotic recall. According to the reports of some researchers, he spoke of material indicative of latent fears and desires and interpreted the Hills’ experience in Freudian terms. For example, the needle that was inserted into Betty’s navel was symbolic of anxiety over her barren womb. The penetrating eyes symbolized Barney’s anxiety over the disapproving eyes of others regarding his interracial marriage. Barney’s physical ex- amination, in Freudian terms, could signify latent homosexual feelings and fear of attack upon the genitals. The threat that danger would come to Barney if he spoke of the abduction could point to his perceived threat that harm would befall him because he married a white woman.
Although UFO researchers and skeptics have reported Simon’s Freudian interpretation of Betty and Barney’s testimony, a letter written to Betty by Simon on December 8, 1966, calls this claim into question. Betty had written a letter to him expressing concern over remarks allegedly made by Dr. Simon that had later been quoted in an article that appeared in FATE Magazine. Along with her letter she mailed a photocopy of a letter that contained a reference to Dr. Simon’s Freudian interpretation of the Hills’ UFO encounter.
He replied as follows:
The author seems to make a fanciful, what I suppose would be called “Freudian” analysis of your experience, whereas Mr. B. [name deleted by author] uses the term Freudian in a most pejorative sense to sneer at me on the basis of something which he has read in a magazine of which I would never think of reading nor would my friends. Let me say at the outset that I was not interviewed by anyone connected with FATE nor do I know anyone connected with it, nor did I make any such remarks as Mr. B. attributes to me. I do not consciously use the word Freudian either as a noun or as an adjective and I do not speak of Freud in any other sense than that of one who has worked in the field of psychiatry and human behavior and who has contributed greatly to our understanding of human psychology. Mr. B. does not seem to understand the difference between interpretation and description of phenomena. At no time have I interpreted your dreams or experiences, nor do I propose to. I called to your attention and to Barney’s the probability that people would do so, as did the above- mentioned author, and I am sure many others. This is something we have to tolerate.