Over 60 years ago, Portsmouth residents Betty and Barney Hill claimed they were abducted by aliens while visiting the White Mountains. Their story not only captured national attention but shaped how alien abductions are depicted in popular media to this day.
The Hills are the focus of a new exhibition at the Portsmouth Historical Society. But it’s not just about aliens, it also includes their work as civil rights activists on the Seacoast during the 1960s.
“I really feel like this one night, this one experience that happened to them, has defined their whole story,” said Emma Stratton, the Portsmouth Historical Society’s executive director. “But their lives were so much bigger than that one night.”
She said the curators first discovered the Hills’ civil rights work while going through all the materials on Betty and Barney’s life for the exhibition.
They found both Barney and Betty were on the Seacoast Council on Race and Religion, and that Barney served in the NAACP in Portsmouth. He would investigate cases of discrimination and civil rights violations for the chapter. Most notably, Barney helped file the first successful lawsuit in New Hampshire courts using the then-newly minted Anti-Discrimination Act.
The Civil Rights era in the 1960s was also part of the national culture that set the stage for both the Hills’ abduction story and how the public responded to it, Stratton said. And then there was the influence of the space age, the atomic age post-World War II and everything that was going on in the U.S. and worldwide in terms of the race to the moon.
“So their event, the event that happens in their lives, is right at the kind of juxtaposition of those two things,” she said.
And it’s a story that still fascinates many people to this day. Stratton attributes that, in part, to the desire for understanding the unknown.
“To a lot of people, it seemed that Betty and Barney had some of the answers,” she said. “There's always conspiracies around what the government may or may not know. In more recent news, there's been a lot of discussion about releasing files that have to do with Area 51 or different alien encounters.”
The Hills’ story inspired a lot of popular media. Stratton said science fiction films from before their abduction in the 1960s depicted aliens in a noticeably different way. Those aliens, she said, were much more robotic or metallic, like variations on spacemen and astronauts.
Then in the 1970s, Steven Spielberg took inspiration from their tale and a few others and wrote Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That’s according to Meredith Affleck, the exhibitions manager.
“And that's really when that depiction of what aliens look like became part of the sort of social consciousness. From 1977 up through the ‘90s and the 2000s, you can see that same format showing up time and time again,” Affleck said.
Like the first episode of X-Files in the ‘90s, which also heavily took from the Hills’ experience.
So what did those aliens look like? Betty and Barney had described them while under hypnosis, as they tried to recall the details of their abduction.
“So little green men have existed for a long time, way before the space age. What is different about Betty and Barney's story is that we start to get this sort of archetypal shape of what these creatures look like,” Affleck said. “And they're not just green, they're green-gray, and they've got these large eyes and they've got a very small nose and a very small mouth, thin limbs and they tend to be shorter.”
Then there’s the question: Is Betty and Barney’s story real? Did the alien abduction really happen?
“I want to say out loud that we are very specifically in this exhibition, not choosing a side as to whether or not it happened, because that's not the point,” Affleck said. “The point is that this story affected these people's lives and it affected our lives and how popular culture and science fiction happens today.”
Stratton agrees. She said their goal as a historical society is to say history isn’t just something that happened 250 years ago, it’s also things that happened 50 years ago or yesterday.
“We've been posting about it on social media,” she said. “The number of people who have commented and said, ‘Barney was my mailman. Betty was our family's social worker.’ There are so many people out there who still remember them and have a connection to them, and that’s one of the things we try to bring forward in our work.”
Stratton said the archival materials gave them a snapshot view of the Hills as a real couple in Portsmouth who were doing real work, even if that work was overshadowed by the highly publicized story about their abduction.
“Imagine what they could have done had this not happened to them,” she said. “But then again, we now have their story saved because this event happened to them. So now we have this lens into civil rights. So for that, I'm grateful that we have this access. And we can invite people in who may know about Betty and Barney through their alien encounter. So if they come for the aliens, we hope they stay for the history.”
