New Hampshire is famous for two incidents in the 1960s involving UFOs. One is known as The Exeter Incident, when a hitchhiker and other witnesses say they saw a large flashing object in the sky. Another supposedly took place in the North Country, where Barney and Betty Hill of Portsmouth say they were abducted by aliens.
Toby Ball is an author and host of the podcast “Strange Arrivals” about the Hills’ experience and UFO folklore. The podcast is now being developed for a feature film with Demi Moore and Colman Domingo. This Thursday, he will be talking about the podcast and its transition to the big screen at Stratham’s Wiggin Memorial Library.
He spoke with NHPR’s Rick Ganley about why the Hills’ experience fascinates people to this day.
Transcript
Some people are familiar with the Hill story, but I just learned some Granite Staters don't know about this incident at all. Remind us who Betty and Barney Hill were.
So Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple who lived in Portsmouth. The actual abduction – supposed abduction – took place in 1961. The Hills were both prominent in civil rights work in the Seacoast area during that time. But in 1961, they had gone on a trip. They had gone to Niagara Falls, Toronto, Montreal. On their way back from Montreal, they passed across the border near Colebrook and ended up driving through Franconia Notch on their way back to Portsmouth. It was in Franconia Notch and just past it that they had this supposed UFO encounter.
In this encounter they said they were abducted, no?
Yes they did. So it's interesting, at first they remembered seeing a UFO in a couple of different places in Franconia Notch and then further down by Indian Head. And then they felt as though they'd lost a couple hours of time. They arrived home a couple hours later than they were expecting to.
And it wasn't until a couple of years later when they underwent hypnosis with this psychiatrist, Doctor Benjamin Simon, down in Boston – he put them through regression, hypnosis. And Betty in particular, but Barney as well, suddenly had these memories of being sort of deflected off of the road that they were on, driving down a side road, running into a group of aliens brought aboard a flying saucer and subjected to medical exams before being returned and then continuing on their drive. So they didn't really know about that part of it for another two and a half years.
What do you think happened?
I don't know. I'm a skeptic in that I don't believe that they were actually abducted by aliens. But I think one of the reasons why this story has so much staying power is that there's not an easy answer to that question of what happened. In my podcast, I lay out several different factors that could have contributed to the overall sense that it had happened.
They were driving while very fatigued. People have pointed out that Jupiter was very bright. They [drove] through Franconia Notch – there's a light on top of Cannon Mountain. There's a whole bunch of these kinds of things that if you're fatigued and your anxiety level is high, can all kind of build into this narrative of, "There's something following us." I don't think they were actually abducted by aliens.
Why do you think these stories of UFOs have such a hold on us?
The Betty and Barney Hill story – one of the things I think is really interesting about that is that it has really been sort of the template for alien abduction stories going forward. It's a lot of being taken from places that are fairly remote.
The modern UFO age started in 1947 basically with a famed sighting up in Washington state, and then the Roswell supposed crash. After World War Two with the atomic bomb and other things that were going on technologically and people trying to come to terms with that, and then also desiring a sense of wonder and sort of melding those two together with the idea that these things with great technology – technology beyond our understanding – are coming to visit and ponder that there's more to the universe than what we encounter in our daily lives.
