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- [00:00]
Mark Gagnon
Before alien abduction was ever a phrase, before, gray aliens with big black eyes were just like a household image. Before Hollywood, before the history channel, before YouTube videos, before any of that, there was a couple driving home from vacation in New Hampshire. It's late, they're tired, and they see a light in the sky that just wouldn't stop following them. And what happens next becomes the foundation for almost every alien abduction story you've ever heard. The missing time, the medical exam, the these gray beings with massive eyes. It all traces back to Betty and Barney Hill. And the crazy part, they never wanted any of this. They reported what happened to the Air Force, they told their pastor, and then they tried to live normal lives, but the story wouldn't let them. So tonight we go back to the evening of September 19, 1961. Just a two lane highway, a young couple, and the night that gave the modern UFO phenomena its blueprint. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world. From all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here in the tent at the campsite. I try to deep dive in all the craziest wormholes I've ever found on the Internet. And oh boy, we have a fascinating one today. But before we begin, I just want to say thank you so much to you. Yeah, dude, you listening, watching right now to the sound of my voice because every time you click on a video or you support or comment or anything like that, you help keep the lights on in the tent and you keep the fire burning at the campsite. Also, there's a new secret society that I want to share with you. And it's one of the most coveted, most strange and most secretive society of all the societies that have ever society. And that is the bonfire. Yes, that is the campsite. That is the, the place where we gather as campers. And it's@patreon.com Camp Gagnon. Yes, I have great news for you. That's where we gather as a society and that's where you're going to get every single episode of this show. Plus history camp, plus religion camp, all ad free. You're also going to get monthly, you know, zooms where we all just hang out as campers and we just chop it up. And also you're going to get bonus episodes that never go out to the public. All that and more. And you get to talk to Christos, Right.
- [02:18]
Christos
What's up, everybody?
- [02:19]
Mark Gagnon
Christos, the best place to talk to you is over there@patreon.com Camp Gagnon. Not here, Sorry.
- [02:24]
Christos
People don't talk to me there either.
- [02:26]
Mark Gagnon
Well, they have good judgment. Anyway, today we're talking about a fast ending case. Maybe the story that busted open the entire ufo, uap, high strangeness world and is really one of like the first, I guess you could say, mainstream abduction stories that have happened in the United States and really like set the whole craze. Now, of course, if you led, if you read any. Oh, what's it? I can't believe I'm forgetting the name of the guy. French author that wrote Passport to Magnonia. It's a book. His name is Jacques Valle. Jacques Valet. Thank you. I'm sorry, Jacques Valle. I can't believe I forgot your name. Jacques Valle obviously wrote this book, which is a fantastic book, if you're interested in this topic. He takes a very analytical, almost anthropological look at all the strange stories that come across cultures and across time from, you know, like fairies that are abducting kids in, like, the Highlands of Scotland to, you know, like folklore that exists all throughout, you know, Western Europe, to Native American stories and, you know, things in the Bible. It kind of like paints this picture that there are these phenomena that have been happening for years and we just call them different things. And the Betty and Barney Hill story is the first one that I can really think of that really brings the abduction story into the American fold in the way that we know it now. As a fun fact, I always thought Benny and Barney Hill were the people who basically inspired the names Betty and Barney Rubble from the Flintstones.
- [03:52]
Christos
Wouldn't have been great though, if it was.
- [03:54]
Mark Gagnon
Would have been great. And my Mandela brain thinks that it still is that. But the reality that I just found out is that that's not the case. Of course, if you've seen the Flintstones, Betty and Barney Hill. No, Betty and Barney Rubble are the main characters. And that show premiered in 1960. And the story we're talking about today is 1961. Now, in order to understand why this case mattered so much in 1961, you have to understand who Betty and Barney Hill were. They weren't UFO chasers, which wasn't even really a thing then. Like, if you were into like aliens, like, it was very strange, especially in the 60s. I mean, that's insane. They weren't even like really sci fi fans. And they weren't using this moment to get attention. You see, Betty was a Social worker for the state of New Hampshire. She had a degree in education, and Barney was a postal worker. Literally, just like a post office guy. And he served on a state advisory committee on civil rights and was also a member of the naacp. And the last part matters. I'm bringing that up for a reason, because in 1961, Barney and Betty were a. An interracial couple. You see, Barney was black and Betty was white, and they were living in New England at a time when their marriage was still illegal in 22 states. And I think that that part actually gives their story much more credibility that this was a couple who had h. Wanted to be out of the limelight. Like, they didn't necessarily want to shine a, you know, a massive spotlight on them in the national view because they're already hated by people all over the country that in the 60s were super racist. You know, like the Civil Rights act hadn't even passed. Like, they were living in a different America. Obviously, you know, America has its issues, but in the time, it was so, you know, specifically in the south, but, like, even in New England, it was like people would look twice and be like, oh, that. What's. What's going on there? So for these people to come out and share their story the way that they did, I mean, they were just inviting an onslaught of criticism, not even about their experience, but just about them and their relationship and the family that they've built. But let's talk about the experience. September 19, 1961. Betty and Barney are heading home from a short vacation in Niagara Falls in Montreal, and they're driving back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in a 1957 Chevy Bel Air. And with them, they had their dog, little Delsey. And they're going home, and they get on the road pretty late, and they're trying to just make it home in one shot. They're tired. They're like, let's just go. We'll make it. There's going to be no traffic, and we'll just get home in just a couple hours. And so this means that road that they have to take is going through the White Mountains in the middle of the night on Route 3. Now, Route 3 in the White Mountains is literally just two lanes and forest on both sides. And just. Just driving. Just road in front of you, road behind you. That's it. No street lights. There's no cell service even today. Obviously, back then, there's no cell phones. And in 1961, that's all you had. It was just you. No GPS. You're just in a car. You, your wife, your dog. You got your headlights and trees, and you're driving. And then around 10:30pm somewhere south of Lancaster, Betty notices this light that's in the sky. And at first she thinks, like, it's a star or maybe it's like a satellite or, you know, like, obviously this is, like, around, like, you know, space race time. So everyone's talking about space, so they're kind of looking up, being like, oh, maybe it's like a plane. Like, they. They can't fig is. But then she realizes that it's moving, and it's moving as if it's staying alongside the car. So she points it out to her husband, Barney, and they pull over to get the binoculars out of the car. But when they look through the binoculars, the light isn't just a light anymore. It's an object. And it's getting closer. Barney tries to dismiss it. He's just like, oh, it's a. It's a commercial airliner. And, you know, obviously his wife is like, honey, there's no airport. And he goes, ah, it's just off course. They're taking a route. There's probably weather over there. So they're trying to go around the weather. It's all, you know, he's trying to come up with something. Okay, maybe it's a small plane. You know, there's, you know, an air Force base that's not far away. So maybe it's like a military aircraft. But the object is doing things that no one had really ever seen a plane do. It's moving in these weird, irregular patterns. It's, like, stopping. It's hovering, drifting kind of silently, you know, saucer, like. So they get back in the car, and they keep driving, and they're a little freaked out. And now it's following them. So the object literally tracks them for miles, sometimes staying ahead, sometimes it's behind them, but it's always within their line of sight. And then eventually, somewhere near Indian Head, which is like a rock formation on Route 3, the object comes down, and Barney pulls over again, and the thing is now hovering maybe, like 80ft above the road, directly in front of them. Barney grabs binoculars and steps out of the car, walking into, like, a nearby field to actually get, like, a clear look at it. And this is where Barney's recollection gets really specific. Through the binoculars, he sees a craft shaped. Shaped like a pancake is how he described it. It's wide, it's flat, and it has a row of windows around the rim. And inside those windows, he Sees figures, and he counts somewhere between, like, eight, maybe 11. And they're all looking down at him. And they're all wearing uniforms. They look as like. As if they're working. Like it's like a crew operating equipment. One figure stays at the window and looks directly at Barney. And he later described feeling like he was being communicated with. Not in words, but with, like, the impression of just a single command. And that command is this. Stay where you are. And then the panic sets in. Barney runs back to his car. He screams at his wife. He says, yo, we're going to get captured by this thing. We got a dip. He throws the car into gear, hits the gas. And as they speed off, they begin hearing strange beeping noises coming from the trunk. And then the entire car starts to vibrate. And then in that moment, they both feel these waves of drowsiness. Like they feel like they're almost getting drugged. And then instantly, they're driving again. Not erratically, not getting chased. They're not in fear anymore. They're just driving. But they don't really remember how they got there. So when Benny and Barney finally arrive home in Portsmouth, the sun is starting to come up. But that's not possible because the drive from Indian Head to Portsmouth is about three hours. And they had been driving for less than an hour when the object showed up. So they should have been home by, like, 3am but now it's like, almost 5am Two hours of their lives are missing. And here's the thing. At first, they don't really notice. I mean, they're tired. You know, you've been on vacation, vacation with your wife. I mean, you're exhausted, you know, I mean, probably an argument happened, you know, the time goes away, but they start to realize they're, like, kind of confused, and they're just exhausted when they pull up to their house. So they go to bed, and when they wake up, things are noticeably different. Her dress is torn, and it's stained with, like, this strange pink powder. His shoes are scuffed up in a weird way, almost as if, like, he had been dragged across the ground. And the leather strap on the binoculars that he was using is broken. And he finds these unexplained ring of, like, warts on his groin. And their watches have stopped. And his. Their watches never work again. And then, of course, there's the car. They go out to look at the car in the daylight, and they notice these shiny, polished, polished spots on the trunk in, like, perfect circles, about the size of, like. Like a quarter, like a One of those silver dollars. And Betty actually ends up testing the spots with a compass. And when she placed the compass near the circles, the needles just start spinning crazily. And then they behave normally just a few inches away. Two days later, Betty calls her sister and tells her about this thing that happened to them and this thing that they saw in this weird sort of time, you know, missing time phenomenon, like, all the weird stuff. And her sister suggests that she contact someone within the local UFO community. And that phone call sets off everything that happens next. So now, on September 22, 1961, two days after the encounter, Betty calls Pease Air Force Base and reports what they saw. And this part is verified. It's in the official record. But here's the thing. She doesn't actually say everything. She leaves out the part of, like, the figures in the windows. She leaves out Barney's reaction at that field. She just gives them a general description of a craft and these strange lights and nothing more, because she's afraid that if she says everything like, oh, yeah, we saw these alien things in a saucer, she's going to be labeled as a crazy person and no one will ever take them seriously. She's going to lose her job. Like, it's a massive social risk to just come forward with this at the time. These two are just both professional people that are upstanding within their community. They're leaders amongst, you know, the people that they live around. But one person did, one person took them extremely seriously. That's Major Paul Henderson. And he calls her back the same day and questions both of them extensively over the phone. And then the next day, he calls again. He wants even more. More details. Henderson logs the case under the Air Force's official UFO investigation program, and this is now disclosed as Project Blue Book. He also files an Air Intelligence Information report with the 1066 Air Intelligence Service Squadron. This is a unit solely responsible for organizing and analyzing all of these unidentified sightings that happen in the sky. But here's what makes the report really strange. Henderson doesn't have to take their word for anything, as a matter of fact, because he actually knew about this UFO before they did. While Betty and Barney were on Route 3 that night, two separate Air Force radar installations near Peas logged an unidentified target. The radar data is attached to Henderson's report as supporting documentation. So the Hills aren't the only witnesses to this thing. The radar saw something, too. And yet Project Blue Book's initial conclusion on the Hill case was that maybe they just saw the planet Jupiter. Now, what's difficult about trying to chalk all this up to, you know, seeing like a bright planet in the solar system is that Jupiter doesn't follow your car. It doesn't hover 100ft above the road. There's no windows on Jupiter, and it definitely does not register on an Air Force radar. Now, even Henderson's own report acknowledged that the object's behavior didn't match anything astronomical. So the radar scans attached to the top of the file completely contradict kind of his explanation of what's inside the file. First it was Jupiter, and then it was an optical condition, essentially saying that Betty and Barney were seeing a mirage or maybe they were seeing, like, spots on their eyes or like, you know, floaters that you see sometimes. And then they called it inversion, which claims that a layer of warm air trapped cold air, causing light from a star to bend and kind of jump around, which is a real thing. You go to, you know, Salt Lake City, you'll see an inversion. It's kind of like a weird kind of visual thing, but you can. You can tell what an inversion is. And then by September 27, 1963, the case was officially closed with the most generic possible explanation. Insufficient data. With radar contacts and a torn dress and these weird scuffed shoes, and two witnesses who passed every interview without contradicting each other or themselves, the conclusion was insufficient data. So for the Hills, this wasn't acceptable. They knew that they saw something, but they also knew that there was something else going on, something that they couldn't access in their normal memory. So while the Air Force was filing the case away, Betty starts to dig deeper. I mean, you have to think for her at this moment, she's seen this crazy thing. She gets interviewed by top ranking military officials, and then the case is kind of thrown away. But for her, she's still remembering everything that's going on. Or at least she remembers, you know, the parts that she can remember seeing this thing, all the weird stuff with the car. And she's like, something happened to us, and it's driving her crazy. So she wrote to Major Donald Kehoe, a retired Marine officer running an organization called nicap. This is the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Now, the NICAP was the most respected civilian research group in the country at the time, full of former military and a lot of intelligence guys who, you know, really started to take this subject seriously. Now, NICAP sent a man named Walter Webb to interview the Hills at their home on October 21, 1961. About a month after the encounter, Webb sat with Betty and Barney for six hours. And this really matters because everything in that interview is from their conscious waking memory. There's no therapy, no hypnosis or any type of drugs. It was just two people a month after their event, basically walking an investigator through everything that they remembered. Which again, is what I've told you. It's the craft, it's the figures in the windows, it's the beeping, it's the drowsiness, the missing time, all of it was already on the record by October of 1961. Webb's final report concluded that the Hills were credible witnesses describing something that he couldn't explain. The document is one of the foundational pieces of the entire case. And it existed years before the next chapter in Betty and Barney's life. And this chapter is the hypnotic regression. So 10 days after the encounter, Betty starts having these vivid recurring nightmares. Just five nights in a row. And it's always the same basic setup. She's having these dreams that there's small beings and matching uniforms, a metallic disc shaped room, a medical examination, and Barney walking behind her in almost like this zombie like trance. And after the fifth night, the dreams stopped and they never came back. But she couldn't stop thinking about them during the day. I mean, it would haunt her. And reliving it and that feeling she would have from these dreams just seared into her brain. So In November of 1961, she sits down and writes her dreams out in detail. And at first she doesn't show Barney. Meanwhile, Barney's having his own issues and he's starting to really fall apart. He starts developing ulcers, his blood pressure starts to spike, he's anxious all the time, he's just on edge. And he eventually starts therapy with a Boston physician, but it doesn't really help and he continues to get worse. Then in 1962, Betty and Barney were at an event where an Air Force captain named Ben Sweat, who happened to be an amateur hypnotist, was a guest speaker. Barney begins telling Sweat about his experience and the missing time aspect and asks if maybe he can hypnotize him. But Sweat tells him this is not something that an amateur hypnotist should be handling. He needs a real psychiatrist. So Sweat refers him to one of the most respected psychiatrists in all of New England, a guy by the name of Dr. Benjamin Simon. And this is where the case becomes something that the world had never seen. You see, Dr. Simon is not a UFO researcher. He didn't believe in aliens or flying saucers or any of that crazy stuff he was a Harvard trained psychiatrist who used hypnosis during World War II to actually treat soldiers who were suffering from this. This disorder where soldiers would come back from war and they would be shell shocked or disassociated or depressed or angry. And it's now what we know as ptsd. So he had a professional reputation and was a true skeptic. But he agreed to take the hills on as patients in late 1963. And by January 4, 1964, their first session began. And his goal was pretty straightforward. He just wanted to help them. He didn't necessarily know what had happened to him, but he knew that they were suffering. And so he wanted to help them try to recover the memories from those missing hours and kind of work through whatever trauma was buried there and put the whole thing behind them. Now I imagine this guy, you know, as a. A very skeptical, you know, professionally trained psychiatrist, probably being like, hey, maybe you guys got robbed. And maybe, you know, there was some type of violent attack that happened to you guys. And, you know, there's these repressed memories. And so if I can bring these memories up and you guys can work through the trauma, then you can actually have closure to what happened to you. You know, it's not aliens, of course. It's maybe something else. So he hypnotized Betty and Barney separately with multiple sessions each. Simon was adamant that neither was allowed to hear each other's recording. That way they couldn't influence each other. They couldn't, you know, compare notes or, like, get the stories to be the same or anything like that. And what came out of those sessions terrified everyone in the room. So Barney goes first, and under hypnosis, he didn't speak, he screamed. He. He was sobbing, like, physically thrashing in the chair. And the recordings of his sessions are genuinely difficult to listen to. You can still find them now online. He described being taken from the car, being led through the woods by this shot, short humanoid being being brought up on a ramp into a craft and then placed on a table. He even described one of the beings, the one that he called the leader and said that its eyes wrapped around the sides of the head. He said that they spoke to him without ever moving their mouths and that he couldn't fight back. He couldn't move. He. He couldn't do anything. He was just completely incapacitated, just laying there suffering, terrified. And then Betty's session came, and hers were calmer and actually more detailed. She described the same beings, but said that she was separated from Barney. She described being placed on a Similar table for what she called this physical examination. She said a long needle was then inserted into her navel, something that the beings told her was a pregnancy test. Now, what's strange about that detail is that in 1961, the medical procedure that she's describing didn't exist in mainstream medicine. And what she's describing is essentially a modern prenatal needle test, which wasn't widely used until many years later. She said that they took skin samples and hair samples and fingernail clippings. And kind of a funny part of the story is that one of the beings supposedly examined her teeth by pulling on them, and they actually seemed surprised when they didn't come out, because when they pulled on Barney's teeth, his dentures came off, and they were confused as to why one of the human's teeth came out and the other ones didn't. Throughout the exam, Betty noticed the beings were organized almost as if there was, like, a clear hierarchy in leadership. The shorter ones did all the work, and the leader who gave the orders was the only one who actually spoke to her at length and was the only one who seemed to really treat her with any care. And before she left, Betty did something that a lot of people never do in these types of situations. She actually asked questions. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you a scary story. Yeah. Specifically for the dudes. All right? Imagine you're going out with your wife. Okay. You're having some dinner. You know, you get some drinks. The vibes are good. And you go back to your apartment, your house. The lights are low. You got a little Miguel playing on the race radio. And all of a sudden, you realize your piece is like, yeah, dude, I'm actually good. You're like, wait, what? We're ready to go. 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To which the leader walked her over to a wall and pulled down what Betty described as a three dimensional map with stars connected by lines. Some lines were solid and some were dashed. When the leader told her that the solid lines were trade routes and the dashed lines were expeditions, the places that they had been to, Betty asked where Earth was on the map. So the leader asked her where she thought it was. But Betty said that she didn't know. To which the leader said, if you don't know where you are, then there's no point in showing you where I'm from. And he rolled the map back up. But Betty then pushed for one more thing. She wanted proof, something that she could take with her so that she would know that this actually happened. So before leaving, the leader gave her a book that she described as having strange symbols on it, almost like a, like a language that she had never seen. And she was thrilled. She asked if she could keep it, and the leader said yes. But as she's being escorted off the craft, she described hearing the rest of the crew behind her somewhat arguing or like in, like a mumble or like a buzzing sound. And they looked agitated with each other, causing the leader to come back to her, take the book out of her hands and, and tell her that the others didn't want her to remember any of this. She was told that she wouldn't retain the memories of her experience when she returned back to the car. So no memory, no book, no star map. But here's where it gets even crazier. In 1964, under Dr. Simon's instruction, Betty drew the star map that the leader had shown to her from her own memory. And it was just a sketch. And you know, there's a few stars that are connected by lines and we actually have the image here. We can pull it up. And so this is the actual sketch that Betty had kind of drawn out. Now, in 1968, an Ohio school teacher named Marjorie Fish actually saw Betty's sketch and became obsessed with it. Marjorie built a three dimensional model of nearby star systems in her living room using beads and string, trying to match the pattern that Betty sketched from memory. And it took her five years. But in 1973, Fish published her conclusion. She believed that the pattern matched a real arrangement of stars centered around a binary system called Zeta Reticuli, a pair of sun like stars about 39 light years from Earth. And you can see the image that, you know, teacher or Professor Fish actually pulled together that compares with Betty's here. So you can see, you know, at the top, there's Zeta Reticuli 2, Zeta Reticuli 1, and then you have all these other different star systems that are kind of branching off from it, and it matches pretty closely. Now, is this something that's just kind of retroactively worked out to look like something in our existing universe, or is it perhaps, you know, something that Betty saw at some point, or maybe this is where they're actually from? Looks pretty similar. I mean, it looks remarkably similar.
- [29:04]
Christos
Like, especially the cylinder on the right bottom.
- [29:07]
Mark Gagnon
I mean, crazy. I mean, I'd have to see, like, what this is actually overlapped on, like, in the actual solar system, because you can make a sketch look like a sketch, but it's hard to make a sketch, like a real thing look like a sketch, you know? Now, this is where I think we need to be a little bit careful, right? The match isn't undeniable proof of anything. You know, a lot of skeptics, including a lot of astronomers, have pointed out that, you know, there's enough stars in the galaxy to choose from and that you can find patterns that fit almost any random sketch. Carl Sagan himself argued that the match wasn't statistically meaningful. But here's the part that you can't dismiss. In 1961, when Betty drew that map, the stars and Zeta Reticuli weren't even cataloged accurately. The precise distances and positions that Fish used to make her model came from data that was published after Betty's hypnosis sessions. So Betty couldn't have known about the star system because the information didn't exist yet at all in the public space or in any form that she could access. Now, again, that doesn't prove that she was on a spaceship, but it does mean that whatever she drew, she didn't just copy it from, like, you know, like a. You know, like a textbook in a library or something. Now, at this point, it's all getting pretty crazy. I mean, the Hills are, you know, understandably traumatized from their experience, whatever it is that happened to them. And they're all, you know, they're talking amongst themselves and amongst their close friends and family about this thing. And some of them are writing them off. Some of them are taking them seriously. But one thing that I think is important to highlight here is that they never wanted to be famous, right? They told their story to Dr. Simon and their pastor and the people at NICAP and a small UFO research group that was in New Hampshire. And that was kind of it, right? Like, they didn't go on the news, like, immediately after anything like that. But In October of 1965, four years after this encounter, a Boston newspaper called the Boston Traveler ran a front page story leaking the case to the public. And the Hills were furious. They never authorized it, and they hadn't even been interviewed for the newspaper article. The reporter had pieced the story together from sources from within the UFO research community. But once it was out, there was no putting it back in. The story exploded across the country, and the Hills became reluctant celebrities overnight. I mean, they received hundreds of letters. They were stalked by reporters. Strangers would just show up at their house. And remember, this is the mid-1960s. Segregation is still rampant, racism is everywhere. And here we have an interracial couple claiming that beings came down from the sky in a craft to abduct them. The last thing they want is public attention. And then in 1966, journalist John G. Fuller worked with the couple to write a book, partly so that they could actually tell their side of the story instead of having all these crazy theories swirling around them. Because you have to think, now they're getting their reputation maligned. You know, people are like, oh, these people are mentally ill. I mean, look, they're, you know, in an interracial relationship. Of course they're crazy. Like, people are calling them awful things. And so they're like, you know what? The stories out there, we need to put our side out to, like, put this to rest. And the book was called the Interrupted Journey. It included extensive transcripts from the hypnosis sessions, Dr. Simon's clinical notes, and the Hill's own account. And the book ended up being a massive hit. And in 1975, NBC actually adapted it into a movie called the UFO Incident. And it starred James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty. The movie is one of the most single important moments in the modern UFO movement because for the first time, millions of Americans tuned in and they saw what this alien abduction actually looked like. You know, the gray beings, the medical exams, the missing time, the hypnosis recovery, all of that. Now, basically every fictional abduction story that comes after this from, you know, books or, you know, E. T or Alien versus Predator or Independence Day. I mean, Prometheus, Prometheus, all these movies are, in ways, directly pulling from the experiences of Betty and Barney and before Betty and Barney. This wasn't really a thing in pop culture, but after them, it was the main UFO narrative for the next 50 years. Now, in the interest of being transparent and really understanding the, you know, scope of the story, we should look at what the skeptics say. And the strongest argument against Betty and Barney Hill is that hypnosis is not a reliable tool for recovering accurate memories. It's been demonstrated in clinical research over and over that people under hypnosis can generate false memories that feel real to them. If Betty had been having recurring dreams about being examined by aliens, and then she described those dreams in detail to her husband over and over, it's possible those dream details could have been absorbed into Barney's own subconscious under hypnosis. Both of them could have been pulled from the same shared mental material, right? Not from an actual event. So Dr. Simon himself actually came to this own conclusion. He didn't think that the hills were lying. He thought they genuinely believed what they were saying. But in his professional opinion, it was that they were recovering under hypnosis a shared psychological experience, not a literal kidnapping by aliens. The skeptic position on this is basically that, you know, if she's having these terrible nightmares and, you know, they're able to. If she's telling him about these awful nightmares and this crazy thing that happened to her that's just coming from her mind, he can also then absorb that. And then when they're under hypnosis, they're both pulling out her nightmare. So that would be the skeptics approach, which honestly, yeah, I think that is a weak spot of their story. But then you also have the Outer Limits episode. Now, Outer Limits is a sci fi TV series from the 60s. And on February 10, 1964, an episode called the Belarus Shield aired on national television. And the episode features an alien with, you guessed it, large eyes that wrap around the sides of its head. Now, we have an image here of the aliens from this TV show. And, yeah, I mean, you can see it kind of looks like a. Like an alien. You know, you can obviously tell it's like a guy in a costume, but it looks like an alien. It's got the eyes going around the side. And the timing here is debated because Barney's first session with Dr. Simon was on January 4, 1964, about five weeks before the episode aired. But Barney's specific description of the wraparound eyes came in a session held 12 days after the episode aired. So depending on which session you point to, this is either a major coincidence or a situation of Accidentally conflating memories. But here's the thing. The case also has some problems for skeptics, too. The biggest issue is the NICAP investigation that came in October of 1961. Walter Webb interviewed Betty and Barney before any hypnosis ever happened, before any therapy, before any of the dreams had even fully settled in. The conscious memory account that he documented. The craft, the figures, the beeping, the missing time, that all lined up. So that means the core of this story doesn't come from hypnosis. The hypnosis added the abduction itself, the exam, the leader, the star map, Zeta reticuli, all that. But the foundation was already there in their regular waking memory, on paper, signed and dated three years before Dr. Simon ever even entered the picture. The torn dress. Betty's dress from that night was real physical evidence. It had a pink powdery residue on it that she couldn't account for. The dress was actually tested decades later by multiple researchers, including the chemist Phyllis Bundinger in the 2000s, who found anomalies in the fabric that she couldn't even fully explain. The results of this test were ultimately inconclusive. But I think it's worth noting that inconclusive isn't the same as nothing. And then, of course, you have the consistency problem. Betty and Barney were hypnotized separately. They couldn't hear each other's sessions, but yet the descriptions of the being in the craft, interior, in the sequence of events, they lined up in ways that are pretty difficult to explain just through coincidence or memory sharing alone. The skeptics have to argue that two people hypnotized independently somehow generated nearly matching false memories about an event that gave both of them a genuine, measurable medical diagnosis without ever talking through the details together. And it's not impossible, but it's just strange. At the very least. I mean, maybe she told him about the dreams in vivid detail, and then, you know, her dreams were then seeded into his mind. It's tough to say. Now, the legacy of this event is really the most significant thing here. Barney hill died in 1969 at the age of 46 from a brain hemorrhage. And Betty lived until 2004, dying at 85 years old. Until the end of her life, Betty stuck by her story. She was active in UFO research circles. She gave lectures and was generally considered one of the more grounded voices in a field that oftentimes has attention seekers. She didn't claim that she was abducted more than once, which is something that a lot of experiences will say. She didn't predict any type of alien invasion. She didn't sell merchandise. She simply just said, this happened to us. And I want people to know straight from me what actually happened. After Betty's death, the keeper of this case became her niece, Kathleen Martin, who had known Betty her entire life and had access to the letters and the transcripts and many of the recordings that the public had never seen. And in 2007, Martin Co authored a book with nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman called Captured, which is now considered one of the most thorough modern treatments of the case. In 2011, a New Hampshire historical marker was placed on Route 3 commemorating the case and making the Hill abduction one of the only UFO incidents in America with an official state historical marker. Their original audio recordings, Betty's dress, and the famous star map are preserved in the archives at the University of New Hampshire. So what actually happened? I mean, what. Like, what. What happened to them? Is it real? Like what. What do we make of this? Well, I think what I can say is that something happened to Betty and Barney Hill on that night of September 19, 1961. They saw something in the sky that the air Force couldn't explain or maybe didn't want to explain. They claimed that they lost two hours that they couldn't account for. They came home with physical evidence on their bodies, their possessions, in their car, and they developed, like, real ptsd like, symptoms after this event, and they sought real help. And under hypnosis, they described separately a coherent, detailed experience that became the foundation for an entire genre of UFO storytelling. Was it straight up aliens? Maybe. Was it a shared psychological experience also maybe true. I mean, was it something else entirely, Something that we don't even have a category for? Was it possible as a, you know, military operation? It's also possible. But what's not a dispute is that two ordinary people had something very extraordinary happen to them on that dark New Hampshire highway, and it's not something that they wanted or that they asked for, and they didn't even really profit much from it. So whether you believe every detail of this story or none of it, the Hill case did something that nothing before it had ever managed to do. It made the question of what if? Just impossible to ignore. And that, ladies and gentlemen, mostly gentlemen, is the story of Betty and Barney Hill. I mean, I truly like. It's one of these that is significant in a cultural sense. So, like, even, like, outside of, like, what happened to them, which we should discuss also culturally, like, this idea of, like, Zeta Reticuli. I don't know if you've ever heard that before. It's something that. I mean, have you heard it?
- [40:38]
Christos
Not before today.
- [40:39]
Mark Gagnon
Really. It's something that I feel like has been brought up in, like, movies and, like, film and TV before when talking about, like, where are aliens from? Like, oh, they're from Zeta Reticuli. Like, it comes all out of this story and, of course, the research that other researchers put together based off of their transcript. But it's just one of those things that it does make you go. It makes. It makes you wonder, because at a time when they're bringing this up, like, this phenomena wasn't mainstream in the way that it is now. Like, the financial incentive wasn't really there in the way that it is now. You know, like, of course, people today can describe their experiences and, you know, end up on a big podcast, sell a book. Like, there's options for them. Whereas back in the day, like, you say you get abducted by aliens, you're putting your entire career on the line. You're putting your relationship with your family, with your kids, with your knees, with everyone on the line just to share a thing that you made up, not
- [41:29]
Christos
to mention the fact that they were an interracial couple is huge.
- [41:32]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, of course, because I don't think
- [41:35]
Christos
they mentioned this in the research, but, like, a lot of couples did. Interracial couples drove in the middle of the night to avoid other people seeing them.
- [41:42]
Mark Gagnon
Right? That's a good point. Yeah. I mean, like, cops would flag you down, and they would, like, pull up to the car and, like, tell, you know, the black dude to get out and be like, what are you doing with this girl? Do you know her? They would interview her and be like, like, people not from America. Or maybe if you haven't studied, like, American history, might not know, like, the nature of race relations in America in the 60s. But, yeah, like, cops would just straight up, like, beat the out of you and be like, ma', am, are you okay? And she's like, that's my husband.
- [42:07]
Christos
He's, like, pleading for him and still beating up on the guy.
- [42:10]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, like, that stuff would happen all the time. So that's a great point. They're like, yeah, they would try to be out of the line of sight. And the idea that they would go public with this in a time where race relations were so tenuous, it. They have so many incentives to not do it that for them to do it makes me feel like they believe what happened to them, you know? And like I've said, I've talked to many people that have experienced bizarre, confounding, unexplainable things. And the sense that I get from talking to them is that they 100% believe it. And I always tell them that when they leave, like, hey, I don't know what happened to you, but I believe that you believe it. Like, I don't think that what you're retelling, I don't think you're lying to me. I don't think you're a crazy person. I think that your experience that you're drawing on right now is legitimate. Now, is it aliens difficult to, like, fully get behind 100%. Is it a military operation? Possible? Is it some type of, like, foreign military that's doing this and that the United States can't, you know, like. Like, it could be some type of, like, again, this is crazy, but, like, is it possible there's a foreign military that's doing this to send a message to the United States? Like, yeah, we can just scoop your people up whenever you want. You can't even stop us. Also possible, you know, like, this is kind of like the height, maybe not the height, that kind of the height of Cold War times, you know. So I'm sure that there was some type of theory at the time, like, oh, this is the Soviets. This is, you know, some adversary coming over here, like, checking our people. Now, as far as the hypnosis and the memory recall, that part is, like, a little tough for me as well. Like, I do think hypnosis can be extremely beneficial in a therapeutic setting. But, like, pulling back memories, it has been shown to be not 100% reliable. So the theory of, like, she's having nightmares, telling it to him, he's now seeding the same nightmares and then pulling them up in hypnosis. It's possible. I've also heard of, like, memory implantation. And it's also tricky to me because, like, this guy, Dr. Simon, with all due respect, is like a very, you know, standard issue down the middle academic. But I'm like, is it possible that that's also a part of, like, a military op? Like, is it possible the United States military is testing, like, memory implantation or, like, false memory recollection, stuff like that? I don't know, but it's one of those things you read and you're like, it's difficult to be like, it's 100 aliens. Because, again, the other. The other part of me that I'm like, why did. There's a few things of this that I find interesting. One, they go out to the car the next morning and they put a compass on the parts of the car that have, like, these weird, like, circular kind of like, abrasions and this compass starts going crazy. And it's like. That should have been brought up earlier. I feel like, like, to researchers and that there should have been, like, research or, like, testing done on the car. I mean, can you con. I didn't find that in the research. But can you confirm that, like, none of that stuff was done, or, like, the dress having, like, this weird pink residue? Well, that.
- [44:58]
Christos
They said they ran tests on it, but it was inconclusive.
- [45:01]
Mark Gagnon
Right. But it wasn't done until decades later. So in my mind, I'm like. Any of the researchers that got that went there should have just taken it immediately and, you know, like, done all the analysis, like, right away, you know?
- [45:13]
Christos
Yeah. There was no official government lab analysis publicly documented on the car.
- [45:19]
Mark Gagnon
No lab analysis.
- [45:21]
Christos
Ufo, sorry, government run lab analysis run on the car. But what we do know is that
- [45:27]
Mark Gagnon
if this is true,
- [45:30]
Christos
that aliens are bisexual.
- [45:33]
Mark Gagnon
Dang.
- [45:34]
Christos
There was the pink stuff on the dress and torn up, but there was also a ring of warts around Barney's genitalia.
- [45:42]
Mark Gagnon
Yeah, that's a good point. Or they're maybe just testing them, but who knows? They might have been getting freaky. It's difficult to say. I mean, it's just. It's a strange story. It's a very strange story. And I. I feel bad for people that have experienced stuff like this because again, I've talked to these people that have experienced stuff, and I really do like them. And I think that they're telling the truth. The people that I've talked to, or at least they're telling their truth. And your whole life, people just call you crazy and they just write you off. And it's like, so unfair that something happens to you. You can't explain it. You didn't want it to happen. And then people go, oh, you're crazy. So that's kind of always been my position on this. Like, something is happening. Something's going on with folks like this. I'm assuming the same thing with Betty and Barney Hill. And they really gotta, like, go through a lot to clear the reputation and like, clear their name. And it's. Yeah, it's challenging. I feel. I feel, honestly, I feel like, sympathy for them where I'm like, damn, that's. I can understand what it's like for people to call you crazy and having to deal with that. It's just tough. So I don't know, what do you guys think? Is there anything from this case that I missed or overlooked in the research. If you never heard of the story, what did you think? Has this ever happened to you? Have you had an experience like this that's, you know, inexplicable that you haven't gotten closure on? I would love to know. Please drop a comment on YouTube, Spotify. I read all of them. Additionally, if you like religious content, you know, this is not directly religious, but dealing with things of the unknown, the mystical. Well, we have religion camp. That is where I do a ton of different content on every religion under the sun, and some of them above the sun as well. Also, we do history camp. That is the channel where I go through every historical event that's ever happened ever. And oh boy, we have a lot of ground to cover. So make sure you subscribe to those because we're going to be churning out content as usual. And if you just like to kick it with us here at the campsite, you're more than welcome. Of course, we go through crazy deep dives and wormholes, typically on the occult, secret societies, the mystical, the unexplained conspiracy theories, etc, as well as sitting down with actual genius people that know what they're talking about. I get fortunate enough that they sit across from me every single week. And it's not just Christos, right?
- [47:41]
Christos
But it could be.
- [47:42]
Mark Gagnon
It could be one day. Face reveal. Oh, anyway, God bless you all. Thank you so much for joining us in the campsite. I appreciate you dearly and I can't wait to see you next time. Peace.