The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction: Release From Capture
Furthermore, in 1961, Route 3 was a cement road. Concrete roads are constructed with evenly spaced expansion and contraction joints. Had the Hills’ trunk been open, they would have heard an even, rhythmic, clicking sound. However, Betty and Barney described code-like buzzing or beeping sounds: beep-beep-beep-beep (rapid succession, then pause) beep-beep-beep-beep.
Now, let us proceed with the Hills’ trip south. The couple turned off Route 3 and entered the new interstate highway in Ashland. They followed it south to New Hampshire’s state capitol, Concord, before turning east for the 46-mile drive along Route 4, to their home in Portsmouth. Betty searched the sky from time to time but did not see the craft again.
When they arrived home, they checked their windup watches for the time and discovered that both had stopped running. Barney was in Colebrook when he last noted that it read the same time as the clock on the restaurant wall. Betty’s was fully operational at Cannon Mountain. Barney checked the clock in his kitchen and noted that they arrived home a little later than expected. It was 5:20. He entered the bathroom to check his body for marks while Betty walked Delsey along the path to their home and listened to the chirping of birds in their yard.
Barney had a nagging feeling that something had been done to his groin, but nothing unusual was evident when he examined himself. Next, he peered through his bedroom window and searched the morning sky, suspecting that something was around, somewhere.
Barney informed Dr. Simon that he was tired when he arrived home, and therefore did not remove his luggage from the car. But Betty added, “Barney brought some of the things out of the car; not everything.” He brought in the ice box and Betty immediately discarded the remaining food. She didn’t want to touch anything, fearing that it might be contaminated. She worried about radioactivity, cosmic rays, and viruses, and be- cause of this concern, she instructed Barney to put everything in the back hall.
Before Betty and Barney retired for some restorative sleep, they bathed and shampooed their hair. Finally, he and Betty retired, discussing how something very strange had happened to them. Betty kept thinking she wished she knew someone with a Geiger counter. Yet Barney’s memory of the abduction was rapidly fading.
When they awoke later that day they agreed not to tell anyone—only talk about it to each other. They each drew a picture of the craft from memory, and when they discovered they were nearly identical, Betty called her sister, Janet, and told her.
Betty added the following detail:
Dot and Henry, who rent the upstairs apartment, came in, and they had suggested that we take….We didn’t have a movie camera and they did and they suggested when we left that we take their camera. And well, we decided not to bother with it. So, Barney said something about well, maybe it would have been a good idea if we had taken their movie camera. And, I’m not sure just what he said to Henry…something about we had seen a strange object in the sky, and if he had the movie camera, maybe he could have taken some pictures. And then Dot had a…oh, I said to Dot I said, “Yeah, you know he saw a flying saucer and he doesn’t want to admit it. And if he had pictures, he’d have proof of it”…something on this idea, I think. And ah, Dot…she herself has a belief in these strange flying objects and she was somewhat interested. And we told her that we had seen one, something in the sky…bouncing around, and that it had followed us for a while, and I think that’s all we said. That’s all she knows to my knowledge. And then, Barney and I kept saying that we weren’t going to talk about it; that we were going to forget about it. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a second. It was on my mind constantly. So I thought that I’ve got to talk about this a little bit, so I decided to call my sister, Janet. The chief of police was at her house and he said that we should report it to Pease Air Force Base. And I said that no, I didn’t want to do that. And, then she said that maybe we should check some things out first. And she said, hang up and let me call the man next door. He’s a physicist.
I called Janet and just told her about how it followed us and…swung around in front of us. I did tell her about the lights and the fins and oh, about the beeping. Well, with Dot, I just told her that it followed us. I didn’t tell her about the beeping at that time. I think maybe it would depend somewhat on the person I was talking with, too. And so Janet called back and said that the physicist who lives next door had said that I should take a compass and go out around the spot where the beeping was heard to see what would happen.
Barney became increasingly irritated with Betty’s excitement, refusing to cooperate with her effort to locate their compass. Finally, she retrieved it from her kitchen drawer and dashed out to her car, which was parked in front of their house. Barney went to the bedroom window and looked out at her as she circled the car, moving the compass toward the metal. Next, she stormed into the house demanding that Barney observe the effect the car apparently had on the compass. Barney retorted that any metal will cause a compass to react. But Betty pointed out 12 to 18 half-dollar-sized shiny spots on the trunk of the car that caused the com- pass to spin and spin. They hadn’t been there the previous day and Betty suspected they were somehow connected to the strange buzzing sounds of the previous evening. Intrigued, Barney began to experiment with the compass. He moved it close to the spots and the compass would spin and spin, but as he moved it few inches away from the shiny spots, it would drop down.
It is common knowledge that any inexpensive compass will fluctuate when it is placed in proximity to the metal of a classic automobile. What we cannot explain is why the compass would spin when placed over the perplexing spots, but drop down when moved a few inches away from them.
Betty reported that the spots could not have been caused by the weather. They had the appearance of clear lacquer paint that had been applied with a template over the color. Later, when she waxed the car, the spots remained shinier than the car’s surface, but during the winter they gradually faded away.
Dr. Simon queried both Betty and Barney regarding Webb’s impression of the mystifying spots. They both stated that Webb was so busy with the initial interview, he had forgotten to look at the spots, and they had forgotten to show him the evidence. In a 1966 televised interview Barney stated, “Walter Webb did not see the spots.” In a 2006 e-mail exchange Webb told Kathy, “You might be interested in this paragraph from my letter to NICAP’s Dick Hall, dated Sept. 17, 1965: “I simply failed to attach much importance to the ‘beeps’ in ’61, and it seems to me that I casually looked at the car but recall seeing nothing out of the ordinary. I believe there were spots on the trunk, but they didn’t impress me at the time as being of suspicious origin.” Later, he added, “My memory is simply too vague about that particular episode.”
In April of 1964, the Hills’ amnesia had been lifted and Dr. Simon altered the focus of the hypnotherapy sessions. He employed the use of hypnotic suggestion to attempt to convince the Hills that the content of Betty’s dreams could explain the amnesiac period. Suggesting that Barney’s empathy for his wife had caused him to absorb her dreams, he argued that they had experienced a mutual fantasy to fill in the gap. He asked Betty, “Now in all of these things that you feel happened, did it not happen in your dreams? Couldn’t this all have been in your dreams?” To this Betty replied, “No.” He inquired about why she felt so sure of it. She replied, “There were discrepancies. It was different.” She felt that the star map held particular significance. He pointed out the obvious discrepancy that the leader, who seemed to speak our language, did not have a basic understanding about aging, dentures, routines, and so on. When challenged, Betty became confused and distressed, breathing heavily and becoming congested.6 She insisted that the abduction was different from her dreams, that there was much more than she had told Dr. Simon. She pointed out that her captors were different than the men in her dreams. They were shorter, had large, bald heads and penetrating eyes, and were dressed differently. Their bodies seemed strangely out of proportion and their appearance was frightening. As her traumatic amnesia lifted, Betty remembered the physical description of her captors in greater detail.