The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: Disbelievers and Disinformants
The late Philip J. Klass, who was for many years the noisiest of the anti-UFO negativists, had, of course, attacked the Hill case. He often almost ludicrously claimed that there were no UFO sightings for which he couldn’t find a prosaic explanation. The claim was even quoted in his obituary. He ignored all the sightings (more than 600) that couldn’t be explained in the Air Force’s Project Blue Book Special Report 14 and the more than 35 cases that couldn’t be explained by the University of Colorado in the Condon Report.3 And he neglected to explain the 41 investigated in detail by Dr. James E. McDonald in his 1968 Congressional testimony,4 and the more than 700 unknowns of The UFO Evidence.5 Of course, Klass didn’t mention Blue Book Special Report 14 in any of his five anti-UFO books, though he was well aware of it from Stanton’s Congressional testimony in 1968 and at lectures Klass had attended. In his 1966 book, UFOs Identified, he explained the Hill case away as a plasma phenomenon related somehow to ball lightning.
In his book UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, he explained the Hill case away as only a shared fantasy stemming from Betty’s dreams that she recounted over and over again while Barney read newspapers or watched television. He cited tape recordings of Betty’s abduction that Dr. Simon had played for him. In comparison to Barney’s terror, he stated that Betty’s voice was calm, as if she were describing a trip to the local supermarket.6 He apparently had not read John Fuller’s description of Betty’s terror in The Interrupted Journey, or listened to Betty’s intense emotional outbursts as she relived the abduction on the hypnosis tapes. Instead, he added, “The ETs were familiar enough with earthly gadgets to know how to operate the zipper on Betty’s dress. But they were completely baffled by the fact that Barney’s teeth were removed, while Betty’s were firmly anchored.” He apparently did not know that the Betty’s zipper was badly torn and dis- colored in the area where her captor’s hands had come in contact with it.
Or, that the dress has undergone several scientific analyses in an attempt to determine the cause of its degradation and ruin by a pink powdery substance. He certainly provided one of the silliest star map challenges at a debate he and Stanton had on the stage in an auditorium at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. On stage he walked over to Stanton’s table and flashed a sheet of paper with a bunch of dots on it saying he wanted to do a scientific experiment that would undoubtedly show that Betty Hill could not have accurately remembered the star map. He wanted the coauthor to look at it for a few minutes and then draw it later on. Stanton refused, pointing out how this was not a scientific experiment. One Website pro- moter claimed that he refused the test for unknown reasons.
The reasons were simple and straightforward:
- Stanton Friedman is not Betty Hill. They have different perceptions, memories, and learning styles.
- Betty had been carefully conditioned, under controlled circumstances, by a world-class hypnotist/psychiatrist to remember accurately whatever happened onboard the craft, and then to draw the map after the session if, and only if, she could remember it accurately. Stanton had no instructions from a hypnotist and was in front of hundreds of observers.
- Betty recalled the map as having a three-dimensional appearance, certainly not true for a sheet of paper.
- Betty recalled the different lines on the map as being heavy trade routes, light trade routes, and occasional visits. There were no lines on what Klass handed Stanton.
One of the most unexpected attacks on Fish’s work came from a surprising source: Allan Hendry. Hendry was, for a number of years, the primary field investigator for Dr. J. Allan Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies. His primary education was as an artist with a strong interest in astronomy. His wife was an astronomer. He authored the book The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating and Reporting UFO Sightings in 1979, and he published an article in Fate Magazine, later picked up and changed a lot by OMNI Magazine, which was slicker and had a much larger circulation.
His basic contention was that an article in an astronomy journal by French astronomer Dr. David Bonneau, had shown that Zeta 2 Reticuli was a double star! But Fish had supposedly shown that all the pattern stars were single stars and amenable to stable planetary orbits. If Zeta 2 Reticuli was a double, that called into question all of Fish’s work. Stanton contacted Hendry and determined that he was referring to a footnoted reference indicating “unpublished data.” Unpublished work, after all, has not been subjected to peer review. When asked if he had contacted Bonneau about this reference, he indicated that he had not. Later, Bonneau indicated that neither star had been shown to be a binary or double! The original thought that one might be was the result of an artifact of the newly developed instrumental technique for determining duplicity, “speckle interferometry.” They had even given it a name: “Mickey’s ears.” It took a while to breathe a sigh of relief, especially because Omni Magazine had claimed that Hendry had used the term “hoax” about Fish’s work and the Hill case. He hadn’t, and made that clear in a statement he later released. But the damage was done, and some uninformed people still point to Hendry’s early work as proving that the Zeta Reticuli explanation was bunk.
It is of some interest that Dr. Carl Sagan, who has probably done more than any other scientist to interest the public in extraterrestrial intelligence, has attacked UFOs in several venues. In the outstandingly successful television series, Cosmos, he briefly discussed UFOs and the star map. The series has now been seen in 60 countries by more than 600 million people. It was a nine-minute segment in episode 12 of Encyclopedia Galactica, first broadcast on December 14, 1980.
Speaking of the Hill case, Sagan said:
They had observed, so they said, an unidentified flying object. It seemed to follow them for miles. After a time the lighting patterns on the UFO changed. It appeared to land. It blocked the road, preventing them from driving on. They said they saw mouthless creatures approaching who were not exactly human….At this point the story becomes still stranger. They lost all recollection of what happened in the next few hours. But weeks later, they recalled some details and discussed the experience with others. Just 26 months later, under hypnosis, they reported that a UFO had landed and that the crew had emerged. They were captured, they said, and then taken aboard the craft. That was the story.
This neglects the report to Pease Air Force Base the day after the experience, the report to NICAP, numerous discussions about the many details recalled without hypnosis, and the simple fact that there were many months of separate, weekly sessions of hypnosis—not the one session implied by Sagan. They had both used binoculars; there were the scuffed shoes, the damaged dress, the spots on the car, and the two rows of windows….Though the night was clear, Cosmos reported that the windshield wipers were running. Sagan depicted the Hills as staggering out of the car like absolute fools beckoned by a light, but with no beings around. Not only did he get the basic story wrong, but he misrepresented the star map, not surprising in view of his earlier letters to Astronomy.
Sagan held up a drawing in which a number of points were connected by single, straight, solid lines, and said, “She was shown a strange window through which she could see a glowing pattern of dots connected with lines. It was, they told her, a star map displaying the routes of interstellar travel. Here is what Betty said it looked like.” What he held up is not what Betty said it looked like. Her drawing had two large circles with five curved solid lines between them. Sagan then brought an- other point and line drawing into view, noting that it “had been widely publicized by UFO enthusiasts.” He didn’t note that some were scientists, such as Stanton, and that the attacks came from UFO un-enthusiasts.
Then he got rid of the lines. They were irrelevant because “These particular stars are selected from a large catalog. Our vantage point in space is also selected to make the best possible fit. If you can pick and choose from a large number of stars viewed from any vantage point in space you want, you can always find something resembling the pat- tern you are looking for.” This is total non- sense, as Dickinson pointed out in an overview, Zeta Reticuli Update, published in 1980 when he was editor of Star and Sky Magazine. Space is three dimensional, and the stars are where they are—not where one would like them to be. And there was nothing arbitrary about the choice. Sagan, as might be expected, made no mention at all of the work of Marjorie Fish, though he was well aware of it, nor of the huge effort that went into building a host of models and reviewing them from different directions.
Sagan took another swipe at UFO abductions in general, and the Hill case in particular, in a very widely read article in Parade Magazine on March 7, 1993. Because Stanton had visited him at his home on December 1, 1992, prior to his lecturing at Cornell University, Sagan sent him an advance draft of the article. The two had been classmates at the University of Chicago for three years, and had been infrequently in contact since then.
Stanton responded to the draft with a 10-page single-spaced critique noting that Sagan’s description of abductions in general and the Hill case in particular were way off the mark.
In an earlier letter he had noted that Sagan’s insistence in the discussion of “reproducibility as the essence of science” was also way off the mark. Stanton pointed out that yes, reproducible, controllable experiments and observations—the first type of scientific activity—are certainly important to science, because they can be published and then presumably duplicated by others. However, the second type is also science: when one can’t reproduce, but can only predict certain events to be scientifically observed (such as eclipses). They can be predicted, but not arbitrarily reproduced.
The third kind involves events that can neither be controlled nor predicted, but scientific measurements can be triggered by such stimuli as noting a major solar storm with a radiation detector and then launching a prepared balloon with a block of nuclear emulsion to measure the energy and number of charged particles emitted during the storm. (This was done at the University of Chicago when Sagan and Stanton were there.) Seismographs can be deployed and readings taken after an earthquake to determine the magnitude, location of the epicenter, acceleration at the surface, and displacement of roads and buildings.