Barney Hill stood on the empty highway, his heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat. The massive craft hovered overhead, silent and enormous, filling his entire field of vision. Through the binoculars, he counted nearly a dozen humanoid figures staring back at him from the craft’s windows. One of them locked eyes with him.
He heard no voice, but the message was unmistakable: *Stay where you are and keep looking. *
Barney tore the binoculars away and ran back to the car. “My God, Betty, we’re about to be captured,” he said, nearly hysterical. It was September 19, 1961, around 10:30 at night.
Barney and Betty Hill were driving home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after a vacation in Niagara Falls and Montreal. They were a respected couple—Barney worked for the United States Postal Service, Betty was a social worker, and both were active in their local Unitarian congregation, the NAACP, and community leadership. The strange light in the sky had first caught Betty’s attention just south of Lancaster. She thought it was a falling star, but it moved upward, darting erratically, growing brighter.
When they stopped for a closer look, Betty saw what she believed was a flying saucer—an oddly shaped craft flashing multicolored lights across the face of the moon. Barney initially thought it was a commercial airliner heading toward Vermont. Then the craft turned and rapidly descended in their direction. They got back in the car and drove slowly down the isolated stretch of Franconia Notch, watching the object draw nearer.
At one point, it passed above a restaurant and signal tower on Cannon Mountain, near the granite cliffs known as the Old Man of the Mountain. Betty estimated it was at least one and a half times the length of the 40-foot cliff profile and seemed to be rotating. About a mile south of Indian Head, the object descended rapidly toward their vehicle. Barney stopped the car in the middle of the empty highway.
The craft hovered about 100 feet above their 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, blocking out the entire windshield. Barney stepped out with his pistol in his pocket and moved closer. Through the binoculars, he watched the figures in the craft’s windows. The one remaining figure continued to stare at him, communicating that silent command to stay where he was and keep looking.
The figures wore glossy black uniforms and black caps. Red lights on what looked like bat-wing fins telescoped out from the sides of the craft, and a long structure descended from its bottom. When the craft began to approach his position, Barney fled. Back inside the car, he saw the object shift to directly above them.
As they drove away in terror, a rhythmic series of beeping and buzzing sounds filled the air. The car began to vibrate. A tingling sensation passed through both their bodies. Then their minds went dull, altered.
A second series of beeping and buzzing sounds brought them back to full consciousness. They found themselves nearly 35 miles south of where they had been, with vague, fragmented memories of that stretch of road. They recalled making a sudden sharp turn, encountering a roadblock, and seeing a fiery orb in the road. They arrived home around dawn with strange sensations and impulses they couldn’t explain.
Betty insisted their luggage be kept near the back door. Their watches had stopped at the same time and never worked again. The leather strap on Barney’s binoculars was torn, though he couldn’t remember it tearing. Both took long showers and drew pictures of what they had observed.
They tried to reconstruct the chronology of the night, but their memories became incomplete and fragmented right after the buzzing sounds. Betty noticed her dress had torn at the hem, zipper, and lining. Shiny concentric circles appeared on the car’s trunk that hadn’t been there the day before. When they moved a compass close to the spots, the needle whirled rapidly, as if exposed to magnetism.
On September 21, Betty telephoned Pease Air Force Base to report the encounter, withholding some details out of fear of being labeled eccentric. The following day, Major Paul W. Henderson called back for a more detailed interview. His report concluded the Hills had probably misidentified the planet Jupiter—though this was later changed to “optical condition and insufficient data.
” The report was forwarded to Project Blue Book, the US Air Force’s UFO research project. Days later, Betty borrowed a UFO book from the local library, written by retired Marine Corps Major Donald E. Keyhoe, head of NICAP, a civilian UFO research group. A week after the incident, she wrote to Keyhoe with the full story, including details about the humanoid figures Barney had observed.
She mentioned they were considering hypnosis to help recall more of the events. Her letter eventually reached Walter N. Webb, a Boston astronomer and NICAP member. Webb met with the Hills about a month later for a six-hour interview.
They related all they could remember of the encounter. Barney asserted he had developed a mental block and suspected there were portions of that night he did not wish to remember. He described the craft and the humanoid creatures in detail. Webb went on record stating the Hills were telling the truth, and the incident probably occurred exactly as reported, aside from minor uncertainties and technicalities.
In late November 1961, NICAP members interviewed the Hills again at great length. This time, the couple noted they had arrived home later than anticipated—it had taken them seven hours to complete a four-hour journey. When the interviewers pointed out the discrepancy, the Hills had no explanation. They recalled almost nothing of the 35-mile stretch between Lincoln and Ashland on US Route 3.
But they could recall an image of a fiery orb sitting on the ground, which they reasoned must have been the moon—until they were informed the moon had set earlier that evening. In late 1963, Barney asked a psychiatrist about using hypnosis to unlock memories from that night. The psychiatrist referred them to Dr. Benjamin Simon, a hypnotherapist in Boston.
Early in their discussions, Simon determined the UFO encounter had caused Barney far more anxiety than he was willing to admit. Though Simon dismissed the extraterrestrial hypothesis as impossible, it seemed obvious he believed the Hills genuinely thought they had witnessed a UFO with human-like occupants. From January to June 1964, Simon conducted several sessions, hypnotizing Betty and Barney separately so they couldn’t overhear each other’s recollections. By the end, he found their memories under hypnotic regression were consistent with each other.
Psychiatrists later suggested the abduction was a hallucination brought on by the stress of being an interracial couple in the 1960s. Betty discounted that notion, noting her relationship with Barney was happy and their interracial marriage caused no issues with friends or family. Critics attributed the episode to sleep deprivation, stress, and false memories recovered under hypnosis. One critic, Jim McDonald, conducted a detailed analysis of their journey, concluding the experience was provoked by misperceiving an aircraft warning beacon on Cannon Mountain as a UFO.
He noted that from the road the Hills took, the beacon appeared and disappeared at exactly the same time the couple described seeing the UFO appear and disappear. The Hill story has been adapted and referenced in pop culture dozens of times since the early 1960s. The couple was portrayed by James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons in the 1975 TV film *The UFO Incident*, and featured in an episode of Carl Sagan’s mini-series *Cosmos*. Most recently, History Channel’s series *Project Blue Book* based their episode “Abduction” around the Barney and Betty Hill incident.
So what do you believe? Do you think the Hill abduction was just another hoax, or do you believe the Hills truly experienced what they claimed that night?
