FigureBetty and Barney Hill (1919–2004 / 1922–1969)

What's documented

Betty Hill (née Barrett, 1919–2004), a New Hampshire Department of Health and Welfare social worker, and Barney Hill (1922–1969), a postal employee and NAACP local officer in Portsmouth. On the night of 19–20 September 1961, returning from Niagara Falls on U.S. Route 3 south of Lancaster, NH, they reported a luminous object that paced their 1957 Chevrolet for about an hour, then a period of memory loss of roughly two hours, then continued the drive home. Betty Hill reported the event to Pease Air Force Base (Project Blue Book file pages survive) the following day. From January 1964 through June 1964 they underwent separate hypnosis sessions with Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, who had treated combat trauma during World War II; Simon recorded the sessions on reel-to-reel. The tapes are archived at the University of New Hampshire’s Milne Special Collections, donated by Betty Hill in 2003. John G. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey (1966) is the canonical primary account. Three details have continued to resist easy dismissal: Betty Hill’s “star map” drawn under hypnosis (later compared by Ohio schoolteacher Marjorie Fish to the Zeta Reticuli double-star system, in a correlation that remains contested), the dress Betty was wearing that night having unexplained tears and a pink residue (Dr. Simon noted both; the dress itself is preserved), and Barney’s binoculars strap having been broken in a way he could not account for. Barney Hill died of a stroke at 46 in 1969; Betty lived to 2004 and continued to give interviews.