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[narrator] It is the first and most highly documented alien abduction story ever told.
Betty and Barney Hill,
a couple in love were driving back from their honeymoon...
when they were kidnapped by a UFO.
Now clasp your hands in front of you.
As they get tighter, you're going to sleep.
You're going to a deep, deep sleep. Your eyes...
[narrator] Rare interviews under hypnosis,
detail how alien beings subjected the couple
to disturbing experiments.
[narrator] Newly uncovered evidence
and declassified government documents confirm
what happened to Betty and Barney was real.
[narrator] We are not alone.
Extraterrestrials do exist.
But what do they want from us?
It was just an ordinary day in America.
Betty, a social worker and Barney, a US postal employee
were driving home after their honeymoon in Niagara Falls.
A trip as their niece Kathleen explains,
they would never forget.
Betty and Barney had a wonderful time in Niagara Falls.
They spent the following afternoon in Montreal.
They thought about spending the night downtown.
But they heard that there was a hurricane whirling up the coast.
And they wanted to drive through the night if they could.
I was 13 years old and I had arrived home from school in the afternoon.
My mother was on the phone with my aunt, Betty.
And I heard my mother's side of the conversation.
When my mother hung up the phone,
she told me that Betty and Barney
had seen a flying saucer up close the night before,
they were concerned that they might have been contaminated.
I was in shock.
I thought this was very, very strange.
[narrator] This is a 1966 radio interview
with Betty and Barney in their own words.
Now, as I understand it,
we have to go back to 1961 to start this,
this whole incident, don't we?
Yes, that's right. September 19th, 1961.
[narrator] The night that changed their lives forever.
Betty had never seen a satellite before.
She knew that her father was very interested in satellites.
And so, Betty wondered could this be a satellite?
But then, she thought, no, it's not behaving like a satellite.
[Barney speaking]
It's clear at this point, this was not a satellite.
It does a circle.
It seems to fly away to the west and then come back directly towards them.
Barney is coming up with the other explanations.
Maybe it's a passenger jet.
Maybe it's a military helicopter.
He's got all these explanations because that's how he thinks.
Privately, he knew that this was unusual.
But he said to Betty, "Oh, it's just a piper cub or a commercial airliner.
Don't even think about that and let's get home.
[narrator] But then, as they continue driving south,
Betty notices the aircraft appears to be stalking them.
Betty said to Barney, "It's coming closer, Barney."
As they looked at it, it flew in a zigzag pattern
and then it appeared to bounce back and forth in the sky like a ping-pong ball.
[narrator] Barney starts to panic.
Up until now, the sighting had been at quite a distance.
But now that they've driven down the road, several miles and they look up.
And it's still there.
Fear starts to settle in.
It knows that we're here.
They're thinking this has a particular interest in us.
There's no other cars on the highway.
And this light is getting brighter and it's getting closer.
[narrator] The object, the metallic disc,
the width and length of a commercial airliner
and as flat as a pancake is now hovering over the road.
Stunned and with nowhere to go, Barney stops the car.
Barney is now determined, he's boiled over not just with curiosity,
but almost a sense of duty.
I can't continue this trip
until we get rid of this thing or find out what it wants.
So he gets out of the car
and he starts walking in the field to approach it.
[Kathleen] Barney is a confirmed skeptic.
Barney does not believe
that this planet could possibly be visited by space aliens from elsewhere.
[narrator] And then he sees them.
Gray uniform beings looking down.
He sees occupants inside of the craft, which is now tilted towards him.
[Kathleen] They're dressed in shiny black uniforms.
They were gray in complexion.
They were completely hairless.
They had eyes that wrapped around
to the sides of their faces larger than human eyes.
[Ben] We would describe this as a Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The witness is not just seeing it at a distance,
but they're actually seeing occupants within the, or outside of the craft.
And windows are now visible
with the occupants looking at Barney
who's staring at them through binoculars.
There's a direct,
it seems, communication as if to say we came for you
and we're not going to be satisfied until we get what we want.
Little red lights started to slide out from the craft on fin-like structures.
And something started to drop down from the bottom of the craft.
[Ben] Suddenly, Barney sees what appears to be a ramp or a ladder.
And now, it seems like the craft is transforming
as someone is planning to come out.
[narrator] Sensing danger, Barney rushes back to the car.
Barney somehow knew that there was a plan
and that that plan was to capture him like, "a bug in a net."
They had to get out of there or they were going to be captured.
[narrator] But it's already too late.
[narrator] A close encounter with a UFO sends Barney Hill
and his wife, Betty, into a panic.
[Bryce] Betty and Barney are now on the run.
They know that something is there that's not supposed to be there.
They know it's some kind of flying saucer.
They know that there are creatures inside it.
[narrator] The beeps are unlike anything they have ever heard.
[narrator] Suddenly, a tingling sensation comes over both Betty and Barney.
Then silence.
As if suspended in a dream.
[Kathleen] As if only a moment had passed,
Betty and Barney heard another series of buzzing sounds.
This time, they didn't see the craft.
But it returned them to full consciousness.
And they realized that they were 35 miles down the highway
with very little memory of what had occurred in the interim.
When people see extraordinary things, they can often be in denial.
You'd have to say that that is possibly the case with Barney Hill.
He's still not believing it, even though he's seen it with his own eyes.
[narrator] After arriving home, the Hills remain puzzled.
They're both feeling a little creeped out.
You know how you feel grimy after a long trip?
They feel that, but it's a little different.
[Ben] Betty notices that her dress has been ripped.
She only bought this dress just before and this is the first time she's ever worn it.
She takes it off.
She feels like she doesn't want to be associated with it
and she puts it in her closet, and never wears it again.
He's just trying to figure out what happened to him.
And Barney doesn't really know.
And it's got him deeply disturbed.
[Kathleen] Betty was very curious. She wanted to learn more.
But Barney said, Betty, don't tell anyone.
No good can ever come of this.
And she disagreed.
She walked to the phone and she called my mother.
We had a neighbor who was a physicist.
Betty was concerned about the contamination.
And so, she asked my mother to call our neighbor
to find out what she and Barney should do.
He told, Betty, if she had a compass
that she should take it out to the car
to see how the needle reacts.
That's not going to measure radiation,
that's going to measure a magnetic field.
So apparently, he knew something about UFOs
that Betty and Barney didn't know.
Betty called my mother again.
And the former Chief of Police of Newton, New Hampshire
was at the house having a cup of coffee.
He was my father's best friend.
And he said to tell Betty
that she and Barney need to make a report to Pease Air Force Base.
Because they had notified all of the police departments
that if anyone had a UFO sighting, they should report it.
[Bryce] Peace Air Force Base is the local air force base
in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1961.
Betty and Barney know people that are involved in the military there.
She gets hold of somebody at Peace Air Force Base
who takes their story in isn't that interested in it.
Until they start talking about the extension wings
and red lights coming out,
then he's very interested in it.
The next day, they actually hear from a captain Paul Henderson at Peace
who wants to know the whole story in detail.
So suddenly, they've told this story that is now being taken very seriously.
[narrator] Incredibly, the Hills are told of another sighting reported that night.
The officer said that the controller at the tower had reported
there was an unusual craft seen on radar at 2:14 a.m.
on the night that Betty and Barney had their experience.
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] Could the two be related?
[Kathleen] The following day, my parents and my two brothers
and I drove to Portsmouth to Betty's and Barney's home.
I was excited in anticipation of hearing their story for myself.
And we finally arrived there.
We went into the kitchen with Betty.
And she told us about the close encounter.
She told us about the buzzing sounds.
We wanted to see the spots on the trunk of the car.
So she took us down the hallway and out to the vehicle.
I could see those very shiny spots.
And I took my finger.
And I attempted to rub a spot off.
My mother saw me and said, "Don't touch it, don't touch that spot.
It might harm you."
And very quickly, I was taken back into Betty's and Barney's house.
It was sort of an epiphany in the sense
that here is something that I had no idea existed.
But suddenly, I was clued into the fact that it was real.
[narrator] That epiphany will lead Kathleen on a lifelong mission
to uncover what really happened to her aunt and uncle that night...
outside...
and then inside the UFO.
[narrator] Several days after her UFO encounter,
Betty Hill visits her local library
where she checks out The Flying Saucer Conspiracy
by retired Marine Corps major Donald Keyhoe.
Widely regarded as a leading UFO expert,
major Keyhoe is a proponent of various theories explaining UFOs,
government cover-ups,
and the threat of interplanetary war.
Major Keyhoe as an authority on flying saucers,
do you yourself believe that they exist?
Well, I'm positive they exist.
The weight of the evidence makes it impossible to arrive at any other conclusion.
What tangible evidence do you have?
Well, at least 800 reports from trained observers,
veteran pilots, radar men, guided missile trackers,
weather bureau observers, all people who are trained to know things in the sky,
who describe these objects maneuvering under intelligent control.
There are hundreds of those reports
where the sightings were confirmed visually and by radar,
and in some cases by photograph.
[Ben] There's kind of an evolution
that takes place with UFOs in the United States.
In the 40s and into the 50s,
the government was primarily concerned with the panic.
They wanted to be able to control the reaction of the public.
There was an official government policy to ridicule and debunk
and really make the witnesses feel
as if they are the fringe, they are the crazy ones.
And they don't deserve any merit because people really aren't seeing these things.
So when the, the Hill incident happens,
it's among all of this frenzy of UFO activity.
But yet, people don't know how to feel about it.
[narrator] Curious to know more about her own experience,
Betty writes to major Keyhoe.
She has begun, what will become a lifelong search for the truth.
What she finds will shock the world.
Located an hour north of Boston,
Portsmouth is New Hampshire's oldest settlement
and only seaport.
In addition to its historic importance,
by the 1960s, the city and surrounding area
had become noted for its fishing industry...
strategic military importance...
and beautiful beaches.
[Kathleen] Betty was a child welfare worker for the state of New Hampshire.
She cared for other people.
She cared for children who were being abused
by their parents or children who were being neglected.
And then she worked in adoption.
She was eventually promoted to the position of supervisor.
She had an opinion on everything.
She loved to express it.
And if you took her on and you battled her about it, she was even happier.
She wanted to be part of the world.
[Kathleen] Betty met Barney at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire,
which was very close to her home in Portsmouth.
And she was working during the summers down there sometimes.
Betty had friends in Portsmouth and they knew Barney.
So they met and she said to Barney,
well, I have an apartment that I rent to tourists.
And if you and your family ever come up here again,
I'd be happy to rent it to you.
So it was sort of a congenial relationship.
Barney was highly intelligent. His IQ was 140.
He wanted to go to college to become an engineer.
But he was told that that was not something
that he would ever be able to do
because of the color of his skin.
He ended up joining the army before the outbreak of World War II.
He was a marksman. He was a truck driver.
And he ended up being wounded.
He then was able to get a job at the Post Office.
And he worked for the US Post Office for many years.
He married. He had two sons. But he and his wife divorced.
So this is when he began a relationship with Betty.
[narrator] Barney eventually moves to Portsmouth.
And after dating for a few years, he and Betty marry.
They were one of the few mixed marriages in Portsmouth.
Although Portsmouth this time,
there was fairly large African-American population.
But you don't want to think of Portsmouth
or pretty much any New England town
as being a northern town without racism.
I mean, systemic racism is the name of the game
as much through New England really as the south.
Barney was one of the people fighting this with Betty.
He was an activist in the NAACP.
He was doing what he could to bring this to light.
Always leading to the idea
that to come out as an abductee of aliens
was a huge risk on his part.
And he was very concerned about his personality
and how he was seen by other people.
So this was a massive risk to him,
which I think leads to the idea
of how much he and Betty's story is actually, a love story.
[narrator] But little do they know the UFO incident is not over
and will continue to haunt them.
Ten days after their encounter in the White Mountains,
Betty suffers a series of vivid dreams that last over five nights.
[Kathleen] In her dreams, there was an encounter
with very human-like entities.
They surrounded the car
and then they took Betty and Barney onto the craft
where they did highly unusual physical examination.
[narrator] In this rare interview from 1968,
Betty describes what happened on board the alien craft.
First, they took Barney into one room and I went into a second room.
In this room, they did what I would call a fairly simple physical examination.
They seem to have mostly interest in my skin.
I had the idea they were taking pictures of my skin.
Also, interest in my hands and my feet.
They also did a test which they call checking my nervous system.
Throughout the whole examination,
it would be like picking up some kind of a strange animal
and looking it over, giving it a checkup and putting it back down again
without any intentions of harming it.
[narrator] The vivid nature of the dreams along with the strange buzzing sounds
are too much for Betty to simply dismiss.
She was wondering if, if this somehow represented reality.
Now, she was a social worker. She had studied psychology.
And dreams that you have just before you wake up in the morning
when you're sort of in a hypnotic state
can include information that really occurred.
Yet, there can be fantasy added.
Betty initially jotted her dreams down on note paper.
And she couldn't forget about them.
And she spoke to her supervisor who said to her.
Maybe this represents what really happened to you
between those buzzing sounds.
And maybe this is what happened during that period that you can't remember.
So Betty sat down and she typed those dreams out.
[narrator] Betty knew she and Barney saw something that night.
But what?
What about those buzzing sounds?
Why did the car have those strange shiny spots?
Could her nightmares be true?
[narrator] Betty Hill's letter to Major Donald Keyhoe generates interest at NICAP,
the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.
According to their records,
similar looking unidentified craft
had been reported flying over California, Kentucky and Indiana.
NICAP in the '50s and '60s is one of the only legitimate and true organizations
dedicated to the scientific study of UFOs.
Now, Project Blue Book is the government's arm
of the air force officially investigating.
But as a citizen group,
only NICAP and a few others were those who brought in
scientists, medical professionals
and had a very rigid way of investigating these events.
[narrator] In October, 1961, Boston-based NICAP investigator Walter Webb
interviews the Hills at their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
[Kathleen] Walter Webb was an investigator for NICAP.
He wanted to know, in as much detail as possible,
where the sighting occurred initially.
How the craft reacted.
How this changed as they observed it.
What Barney saw as he stood in that field.
Walter Webb believed their story because they didn't enlarge on it.
They were serious in retelling what happened.
They were consistent in their details.
Because he interviewed them separately before he interviewed them together.
And so, everything meshed.
He thought that they were reliable, intelligent individuals,
with no reason to want to make something like this up.
The scientific community, at least those who are interested in the subject, took note
that we have some very credible witnesses here.
They're in high standing in society.
They have a lot to lose.
And so, given the credibility of it,
it's kind of one of the first times that many of them had taken note
that we should listen to the alleged abductees.
[narrator] A few weeks later,
when another set of investigators question the Hills,
they make a startling revelation.
[narrator] What happened during those two hours of missing time?
[Barney speaking]
[Bryce] Imagine you're Betty and Barney,
you've seen this UFO, you've seen these creatures
and then you begin to realize that there's a couple hours that are unaccounted for.
They started to get an inkling
that maybe there was more to that two-hour period than it first met the eye.
[narrator] Could Betty's dreams be nightmares of something real?
Is it possible they were abducted by aliens during the missing time?
Betty and Barney decide to investigate further.
Shortly after Betty and Barney met with Homan & Jackson,
they made trips up to the White Mountains.
They were attempting to remember more to jog their memories of what had occurred.
In Betty's dreams, she remembered a huge fiery orb
that seemed to be sitting on the ground of a roadblock.
But she didn't know where or when that occurred
of a dirt road with tall trees all around.
And this was very perplexing.
[Ben] The whole experience from the days, the months and the years
after the event took a major toll on their relationship.
Betty wanted to understand this and to unlock the secrets,
if you will, of everything that happened.
What were the events that were haunting her?
Barney wanted to keep quiet.
He didn't want it to affect their public life
and his standing in the civil rights movements
and everything that they were involved in.
Barney was still attempting to forget about it, but he wouldn't.
It was really eating away at him and was deeply troubling.
[narrator] Concerned over a worsening ulcer,
Barney visits a psychiatrist hoping to find relief.
[narrator] Barney prepares to go under hypnosis.
After years of blocking out what happened,
will Barney finally come face-to-face with his demons?
[narrator] Two years after the UFO encounter,
Betty and Barney Hill travel to Boston
for a visit with one of the country's leading experts
in regressive hypnosis, Dr. Benjamin Simon.
Dr. Simon had earned a reputation for himself when he was a colonel in the army.
He developed a special technique
using deep trance hypnosis in order to resolve the trauma
that soldiers who were returning from the war had experienced.
That caused physiological ailments.
When I snapped my finger, you'll be able to let go
and then you'll get sleepy and your eyes are getting heavier.
[narrator] Is it possible that Betty and Barney were experiencing
post-traumatic stress after their UFO encounter?
And could Dr. Simon help them?
In a rare interview, Dr. Simon discusses his treatment of the Hills.
[narrator] Over the next six months,
both Betty and Barney undergo a series of treatments.
During these sessions, Dr. Simon induces them into a deep trance.
Now, clasp your hands in front of you tight, tight, tight, tight, tight, tighter.
As they get tighter, you're going to sleep.
You're going to a deep, deep sleep.
Your eyes are getting heavy.
They're closing. They're closing tight.
Now, your hands are relaxed. We're going back.
We're going back to September 19th, 1961, when you were returning from your vacation.
We're going back to September 19th, 1961.
[narrator] While under hypnosis,
Barney recalls everything in his conscious memory,
including the drive through the White Mountains
and seeing the strange light up in the sky.
But when he gets to the part about standing out in a field and seeing a UFO,
a mental block forms, a panic sets in.
When Dr. Simon pushes Barney to go beyond
that mental block that he had developed,
Barney says, "Please, doctor, don't make me go there,
please don't let me remember that."
And Dr. Simon said, "You will remember that.
It won't hurt you now."
[Dr. Simon] Calm down.
Barney had a very explosive what's called an abreaction,
where he released a great deal of emotion.
[narrator] Dr. Simon guides Barney past his mental block,
where he recalls for the first time a powerful force controlling him.
[Bryce] Listening to Barney is very difficult.
He's hysterical. He's screaming.
He is reliving the most terrifying moments of his entire life.
This is a man that was in World War II.
[narrator] Later, during another hypnosis session,
Barney recalls hearing the mysterious beeps and what happens next.
Suddenly, he's driving, and he's driving, and he's driving.
And he makes a turn.
And he says, "I don't know why I had to make that turn."
And then he finds himself on a dirt road with tall trees all around.
There's a fiery orb that he sees.
And he sees these entities standing in the road dressed in shiny black uniforms.
And then Barney says, it's them.
It's the ones I saw when I was standing in the field
looking through binoculars.
[narrator] As the entities close in on the car, this time, there is no escape.
[narrator] In early 1964, two years after her UFO encounter,
Betty Hill also undergoes hypnosis designed to recall what happened that night.
Under hypnosis, Betty remembers everything that she had conscious recall for.
And then she remembers Barney taking a sharp turn in the road
and they were then on a dirt road with tall trees all around.
There were figures standing in the road.
And she observed this huge fiery orb.
And she's talking to Barney, what is this?
Are we being robbed? Is there an accident ahead?
Barney says to Betty, "It's them."
Betty becomes terrified.
She has never been so terrified in her entire life.
She puts her hand on the door.
She's going to run into the woods to hide,
but she's intercepted and she loses consciousness.
[narrator] The next thing Betty remembers
is the alien beings escorting her through the woods
and onto the spacecraft.
[Kathleen] They're saying to Betty, there's nothing to be afraid of,
we only need to do a few simple tests,
you won't be harmed and then you'll very quickly be on your way.
She doesn't trust them.
She kicks the one who is beside her...
and this tears the hem on her dress down...
and tears the lining of the dress from waist to hemline.
They've regained control of her.
And she is taken into an examining room on the craft.
[narrator] That's where Betty meets someone she calls the Examiner.
They use some kind of stylus pressing on the vertebrae in her spine.
They take skin samples.
[sobbing]
[narrator] And then it was Barney's turn.
[narrator] While under hypnosis, Barney Hill recalls
how after being abducted by entities,
he too was subjected to a physical examination.
Barney is placed on a table and his clothes removed.
They are interested in his muscular structure as well.
In his nervous system, he's rolled over.
He can feel what seems to be something pushing along the vertebrae in his spine.
[Kathleen] Something slid very easily into Barney's rectum
and then was removed very rapidly.
It wasn't painful.
Then kind of a cup-like device was placed over his genitals.
There was apparently a sperm sample taken.
[narrator] And then it was over.
After completing their examinations,
the entities escort the Hills off the ship and back to their car.
[narrator] It is the most extraordinary story Dr. Simon has ever heard.
[Betty] I've never been so afraid in my life.
[narrator] Were these made-up memories?
Or did Barney and Betty really get abducted by aliens?
[Bryce] Dr. Simon felt that the best explanation
might very well be that the two of them
had had some kind of transference between them
allowing them to sort of create and build the story
that Betty might have had a stronger feeling about this
and her memories or dreams contaminated Barney's memories or dreams.
But he wasn't accusing them of hoaxing.
He just felt that it was a psychological condition.
[narrator] While grateful for the chance to tell their stories through hypnosis,
Betty and Barney disagree with Dr. Simon's conclusions.
They believe their independent accounts or further confirmation
that what they experienced was real.
[Kathleen] They couldn't go along with Dr. Simon's suggestions
that this had to be Barney's absorbing Betty's dreams.
And so, Barney just accepted it as real.
And he felt a lot better because he had military officers
who were encouraging him, who were telling him
that, yes, all of these things are true
that we know there are extraterrestrial craft coming to visit our planet.
And there's no reason to believe
that they're not visiting humans.
And so, Barney felt much better.
[narrator] While the Hills are comforted that the truth has come to light,
they're determined to keep it private.
Little do they know,
it's impossible to keep the first and greatest abduction story ever told,
secret for long.
By the fall of 1965, four years have passed since the Hill's UFO encounter.
Their hypnosis sessions too were in the past.
Barney was now feeling better.
And so, he and Betty had moved on with their lives.
[Kathleen] Barney was still so involved in the civil rights movement
and his speaking engagements.
Because that was what he was really truly fighting for, was civil rights.
[narrator] But then, in October...
their lives turn upside down once again
when theBoston Traveler prints a five-part series
detailing the Hill's UFO sighting and hypnosis sessions.
[Kathleen] It was a huge story.
It ran for five days in the newspaper.
Betty and Barney were extremely distressed.
The Boston Traveler newspaper series,
it blew the cover off the story
that they've been telling a small group of people
to a large group of people.
When I first heard about the story,
I couldn't imagine that somebody would either come up with that or lie about it
for several years,
and meet with Air Force officials and just make up a story.
I mean, why would somebody do that?
And especially, two Portsmouth people who were very respectable and respected.
There was a violation of confidentiality in 1965.
John Luttrell who was a reporter for theBoston Traveler in Boston
had received confidential information from a friend of Betty's.
And this woman had told him everything that she knew
about the encounter and the hypnosis.
He contacted Betty and Barney and wanted to interview them.
Betty and Barney said, no, we do not want this story told.
[narrator] In this rare interview,
award-winning investigative reporter John Luttrell
explains why he went ahead with the story.
These people deserved every single consideration.
But then, where do you draw the line
between maintaining a certain degree of personal privacy
or the public's right to know?
And in making this decision,
it had to be made abundantly clear to all of the readers that number one,
the Hills themselves did not initiate this with theBoston Traveler.
They have not chosen to talk about any of the incidents at all.
[narrator] The sensational tale of an alien abduction
thrusts Betty and Barney into the public spotlight.
This had an impact not only on Betty and Barney, but on the entire family.
We were a very respectable family who had many accomplishments.
And we sat down and we talked about how should we handle this?
Where will we go from here?
And we decided as a family that since it did in fact happen
and since the story had been told that Betty and Barney should tell the truth.
[narrator] Unable to avoid the intense media spotlight,
the Hills cooperate with author John Fuller in the writing
ofThe Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer.
[Kathleen] The Interrupted Journey went worldwide.
It was aNew York Times bestseller.
There was a tremendous amount of public interest.
[Bryce] They literally shook the world when their story came out.
In today's terms, The Interrupted Journey
was like the final movie in the AvengersSaga.
I mean, it was huge.
I mean, everybody knew about it.
It was a book club selection.
It was excerpted in newspapers around the country.
People couldn't get enough of it.
[screaming]
Betty's story, which is so dramatically told
in which she's talking to the aliens.
There's all these things that are going on.
This story wrote itself.
[Bryce] What makes the Betty and Barney case so extraordinary
is it's just a case about first.
They were the first Americans to claim to be abducted.
It's the first time that anyone had missing time.
[indistinct]
It's the first time that hypnosis was used to regress people
to recover those memories.
And it's also the first time that anyone had described the aliens
as what is now popularly known as the greys.
So Betty and Barney really just laid the template out there.
[narrator] The story explodes into popular culture
when book excerpts are reprinted inLook Magazine.
You got to remember that if this is not like today,
it's not like we each have our own radio station
and our own podcast and our own TV channel that we watch exclusively.
There was minimum amount of media.
And so, they end up inLook Magazine.
That's huge.
The book release changed Betty's and Barney's lives,
because Barney had been appointed to the US Civil Rights Commission.
He also was very actively involved in politics, as was Betty.
And they had to put those activities aside for the time being.
And to publicize this book, they took time off from work.
So that they could travel to do television shows.
-What is your name, please? -My name is Barney Hill.
And they did many, many radio shows as well.
My name is Barney Hill.
This was kind of exciting to our family.
Because at that point,
we believed that finally this was being acknowledged as real.
Which one of these three gentlemen in truth is Barney Hill?
Will the real Barney Hill please stand up?
[applauding]
[narrator] The publicity surrounding the abduction
brings out a number of skeptics
who refuse to believe the Hills, leaving many to wonder, what really happened?
It's a question Kathleen has been trying to answer since she was a teenager.
For the past 40 years, Betty and Barney's niece Kathleen
has been investigating the truth behind the Hill abduction.
[Kathleen] I decided to investigate this story
because I was hearing about it on television,
I was reading about it in magazine articles and newspaper articles.
But what I was reading was not consistent with my memories of what actually occurred.
[narrator] In the process, she has uncovered classified documents kept secret
and a government conspiracy to hide the truth.
I wanted to look at the Project Blue Book documents
that had been recorded at Pease Air Force Base,
but also the documents that went to headquarters.
I wanted to find any evidence of further investigation
that was done by the Air Force and further documentation.
I found that a false letter was written in 1963
that contradicted the results of Betty's and Barney's statements
in the Project Blue Book report.
Betty and Barney talked about the movement of the craft,
how it moved erratically in a zigzag fashion, how it swooped down.
So I wanted to compare that to what was written in 1963.
In '63, it said that it was a star-like object at all times
and that there was no movement.
And so, that was just a lie.
Over the years, there's certainly been a lot of debate back and forth
about why doesn't the government just tell us what it knows.
And the government has said,
"Well, there's really nothing to see here" and tried to minimize it.
And it's even worse on the abduction phenomenon,
which nobody seems to, to want to talk about on an official capacity.
And it's really not a surprise because why would they,
if what happened to Betty and Barney has been repeated
hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of times since 1961.
What that says is we have a really out of control situation going on.
One of the greatest pieces of evidence that the Betty and Barney Hill case
could so desperately use would be a bunch of witnesses saying, I saw that thing too.
And that is what the original reporter
for the Boston Traveler, John Luttrell thought he had.
[narrator] In 1976, John Luttrell admitted to interviewing these witnesses
in a letter to nuclear physicist and UFO investigator,
Stanton Friedman.
Before Stanton Friedman passed away, he gave me a letter written by John Luttrell.
And John Luttrell spoke of 12 to 14 people in the White Mountains
who had observed a craft by the same description
on the same night in the same time frame
that Betty and Barney saw this.
His editors didn't feel that that needed to be included
in the five articles that he wrote in 1965.
Well, when Luttrell left the Boston Traveler,
he actually gave the file to his editor with all those witnesses in it.
And guess what?
That file has disappeared.
[narrator] Perhaps the most compelling clue
is the dress Betty wore the night of her abduction.
[Kathleen] She had placed it in her closet.
And the next time she took it out, she thought about throwing the dress away.
But on second thought, she thought she would keep it
because it might hold a clue to what happened that night.
[Ben] Over the years, several tests have been done on this dress,
where there are areas where it appears there are stains.
Now, some of these results indicate that there's an organic material of some sort.
But it wasn't until recently when I re-examined the dress
that I found something very, very peculiar.
Now, we knew about several stains from the outside.
But as I turn the dress inside out,
there's an inner lining to it, where I found a series of three spots.
What's that from?
The location of the stains is important
because some might say
that it's, you know, residue from female menstruation, for example.
But this area was higher up.
It's higher in the abdomen and pretty much where I would expect
if the story is true that a needle was inserted.
You've got different bodily fluids that would have leaked out.
But from the inside, staining the lining of the dress on the inside
and not going through to the outside.
We've confirmed that this fluid does belong to Betty,
and that she put this dress away and never wore it again.
To me, this is consistent with the procedure of having put the clothing back on
or wearing it through the procedure and indicating it happened as she said.
[Bryce] It seems pretty clear what the aliens were doing
based on the regression tapes and the testimony of Betty and Barney.
They're taking a sperm sample from Barney.
They're testing Betty to see if she's pregnant.
Obviously, there's a reproductive issue that's being looked into.
But they're also scraping skin samples.
It's clearly a medical exam.
It seems like they want to know more about our biology.
Why else would they be conducting medical experiments?
It seems like they don't have all the answers.
So, do they keep coming back?
Have they gotten what they want?
Do they know everything they need to know?
Or is there a further motive?
[narrator] In the 1970s,
the controversy surrounding the Hill abduction explodes in the media once more.
This time, when a schoolteacher in Ohio claims the Hill story is real
and she knows where the aliens came from.
[narrator] One unanswered question has always been,
where did these entities come from?
[Bryce] During her dreams and during hypnosis,
Betty Hill described seeing a star map
that one of the alien creatures had showed her a map,
a destination map of the routes that had been traveled.
She said to the Leader, "I know you're not from around here.
Where's your home port?"
And he produced this three-dimensional star map.
[narrator] Under instructions from Dr. Simon,
Betty later reproduced the map from memory.
Then in 1974, the school teacher in Ohio claims to have deciphered the map
and located the star system where the entities originated.
Marjorie Fish was a brilliant woman from Ohio.
She had studied biology in college.
And she was an amateur astronomer, a member of Mensa.
Meaning that she had a very high IQ.
She saw Betty's star map in the first book
that was written about the abduction.
And she was interested in it. She was skeptical.
But she thought that if this place really did exist in our galaxy,
that she'd be able to find it.
[narrator] In order to understand the perspective from which the map was drawn,
Fish constructed an elaborate 3D model using fishing line and colored beads.
[Marjorie] I set up a number of criteria when I started the search.
One was that the sun had to be in the pattern
and it had be one of the stars with a line to it.
Because the one Betty called the Leader had said,
"Where are you in the map and indicating that the sun was in the map?"
[Kathleen] And this was difficult in those days.
She didn't have a computer.
She had to hand copy all of the distance data
that was available on the stars in our local galactic neighborhood.
And the properties of those stars
out 54 light years from our sun in every direction.
In all, she constructed 14 models.
She still didn't have a match.
But there was a new catalog that was released.
She took the new distance data back.
She constructed a model. She found a match.
[Marjorie] I had all 12 points plus three background stars.
And at this point, I was very elated and very happy.
I didn't sleep at all that night.
[narrator] According to her evidence,
the beings that abducted the Hills came from Zeta Reticuli,
a binary star system located 39 light years from Earth.
What we know about these stars is that they're very similar to our sun.
They're called main sequence stars.
And so, they're the right age, the right temperature.
If there are planets revolving around them,
they could be at the perfect what we call goldilocks, you know, distance,
where they could support life.
[Kathleen] We may never know for certain
if there is indeed life on planets around Zeta Reticuli one and two.
But there is a good possibility that there is.
We have discovered that that area of space
that these extraterrestrials allegedly came from
is rich in exoplanets.
[Betty] For a long, long time, I had the feeling
that I had sort of lived through a tragedy in some way.
And sometimes, even now, I still have this feeling.
Because it's something that's haunting.
It's something that's always on my mind.
No matter where I go or what I do.
It's the last thing I think of when I go to bed at night.
And it's the first thing I think of in the morning when I wake up.
And I expect it'll probably be that way for the rest of my life.
Of course after this happened, there's no doubt in my mind
that these are real solid crafts and they're astronauts from another solar system
because they told me so themselves.
[narrator] Today, six decades after their UFO encounter...
Betty Hill and her husband, Barney are no longer with us.
They are buried together beside Betty's sister, Janet
in a small picturesque cemetery in Kingston, New Hampshire.
[Jim] These were two people, long ago, who lived in Portsmouth...
who have now passed on.
But they've left us with a message of something they experienced.
There are aliens out there who may be visiting us,
might not be harmful, might want to know about us,
might want to examine us...
and may just want to be inquisitive about what we're about.
And maybe someday, who knows when.
But maybe someday, they're going to say hello.
[Betty] The good question is, why are they coming here?
I don't think the government knows any more than we do.
They're just as puzzled as we are.
I mean, we know they're here.
We know there are beings on board.
We don't know why they're here.
[conversation over PA]
[narrator] This question of why recently resurfaced
following the 2017 release of the so-called Tic-tac video.
These images of a purported UFO
were captured by a navy fighter jet
and radar on board the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Nimitz.
[conversation over PA]
Peace Air Force Base located in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1961,
was the home of the Strategic Air Command.
And that's where the bombers with the nuclear bombs were housed.
A few years earlier, in 1947,
the Strategic Air Command bombers were held at Roswell.
So UFOs, aliens, nuclear weapons
kind of have this thing where they're brought together,
which would make me say,
it's one reason to believe that the Betty and Barney case might not be random,
but might be something that's related to that
since they lived very close to this nuclear bomber base.
[narrator] Six decades after risking their reputations and careers,
many, no longer view Betty and Barney Hill as frauds, but as heroes.
After UFOs are generally acknowledged,
you can call that disclosure or whatever you want to call it.
But when the world is finally saying, yeah, these things are real,
then the history books are going to have to be rewritten.
Betty and Barney Hill, they're going to be in history books.
[Ben] I always remind people, when I hear the skepticism of,
well, there's no physical evidence,
you could have a murder conviction
from one or two very credible witnesses of seeing an event.
Imagine the implications of that or someone goes to prison or is put to death.
Yet, we ridicule somebody who says
that they had a very fantastical story of a UFO report.
But, yet, this same credibility exists with these witnesses.
I think we should start listening.
[Kathleen] I think that if Betty and Barney were alive today,
they would be satisfied that they had been vindicated.
We know so much more scientifically than we knew in that time frame.
And Betty's and Barney's knowledge was consistent with what we understand today.
I'm Betty Hill,
and my husband, Barney and I were the first persons on this planet
to be abducted by astronauts from another solar system.