Close on the heels of the death of alien abduction maven psychiatrist John Mack, which I noted here (anyone for a conspiracy?), comes word that one of the arguable originators of the abduction meme, Betty Hill, has died. After reportedly noticing a two-hour gap in their recollection during a drive through the White Mts. of New Hampshire in 1961, the former social worker and her late husband Barney Hill ‘recovered memories’ under hypnosis of having been abducted and examined by aliens, whom they were the first to describe in terms which have become the template for alien abduction phenomenology — the “grays”, with small gray bodies, large heads and large saucer-shaped eyes.
I remember excitedly reading John G. Fuller’s Interrupted Journey, the 1966 account of their story, upon its release. The Hills went on to create a career of lectures and media events based on their story. Interestingly, Hill was apparently appalled at what crass American pop culture has made of the alien abduction trend she and her husband had a major role in creating:
“Hill retired from UFO lecturing in her 70s and complained that the quest for knowledge about extraterrestrials had become tainted with commercialism. Too many people with ‘flaky ideas, fantasies and imaginations’ were making UFO and abduction reports, she told The Associated Press in a 1991 interview.‘If you were to believe the numbers of people who are claiming this, it would figure out to 3,000 to 5,000 abductions in the United States alone every night,’ she said. ‘There wouldn’t be room for planes to fly.’
She also said media had fueled UFO fiction.”
Woman Who Claimed Alien Abduction Dies
Debunkers have considered the Hills’ story to be a confabulation under stress, which has been attributed to their being an interracial couple in ’60’s American society. Betty Hill said that they were a happily married upwardly-mobile professional couple and experienced no discrimination. It has also been noted that, after their supposed incident but just prior to their hypnotic regression, TV series The Outer Limits broadcast an episode with a story suggestively similar to their account.
Related: The Zeta Reticuli Incident: Did Betty Hill’s recollection of a star map she reportedly saw while in the alien craft point to the home star system of the ‘grays’?
“A faint pair of stars, 220 trillion miles away, has been tentatively identified as the “home base” of intelligent extraterrestrials who allegedly visited Earth in 1961. This hypothesis is based on a strange, almost bizarre series of events mixing astronomical research with hypnosis, amnesia, and alien humanoid creatures. The two stars are known as Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, or together as simply Zeta Reticuli. They are each fifth magnitude stars – barely visible to the unaided eye – located in the obscure souther constellation Reticulum. This southerly sky location makes Zeta Reticuli invisible to observers north of Mexico City’s latitude. The weird circumstances that we have dubbed “The Zeta Reticuli Incident” sound like they come straight from the UFO pages in one of those tabloids sold in every supermarket. But this is much more than a retelling of a famous UFO incident; it’s an astronomical detective story that at times hovers on that hazy line that separates science from fiction.” (Astronomy, 1974)
