Betty and Barney Hill

Hi Strange is released weekly every Thursday, brought to you absolutely free, but if you want to binge the whole season, it's available right now on Apple Podcasts for all Tenderfoot plus subscribers. You'll also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season. For more information, check out the show notes enjoy the episode.

Barnie and Betty Hill are two of many Americans who claim to have seen an unidentified flying objects, and two perhaps one hundred, who claimed to have been aboard a flying saucer.

Want this on my lapel?

Yes?

Please?

I'll never forget that day. I was thirteen years old in nineteen sixty one when Betty and Barney were abducted. My mother was on the phone with Betty. My mother was concerned, and I knew that something was wrong. When she hung up the phone, she told me Betty and Barney had seen a flying saucer up close the night before. They were afraid they'd been contaminated.

Welcome to High Strange. On September nineteenth, nineteen sixty one, newlyweds Betty and Barney Hill were traveling along US Route three in the mountains of New Hampshire. What transpired that night would forever shape the horror sci fi genre of alien abductions in pop culture.

I'm going to start out telling you about my capture, which happened on September nineteenth, nineteen sixty one.

This is Betty sharing her story at the International U of FO Congress in nineteen seventy seven.

On that night, my husband, Barney and I were returning from Montreal. We left there a late afternoon and Bonnie and I was having a very pleasant drive home to Fortsmouth, New Hampshire. All of a sudden, I saw what I thought with a new star in the sky. It began to move zig zaggy, going up and down, spinning. This object left the top of the mountain, came out over the highway directly in front of the car and stopped.

I was thirteen years old in nineteen sixty one when Betty and Barney were abducted.

This is Betty and Barney Hill's niece, Kathleen Martin.

Betty and Barney had seen a flying saucer up close the night before. They were afraid they'd been contaminated. We had a neighbor who was a physicist, and my mother said that she would call him to ask what else they might do. They had already taken long showers, they had put their suitcases outside, They threw all the food away, so they were taking a lot of precautions, worried that they might have been contaminated by this craft that came within one hundred feet of them. I was just terrified.

What were you afraid of?

The think being taken? I was afraid of being taken. When I was sixteen years old, Betty and Barney had sessions with neuropsychiatrists doctor Benjamin Simon. They would stop at my home and my grandparents' home across the street on the way home from doctor Simon's office in Boston, Massachusetts. They talked about the ets, about what they did to them,

Over the course of this episode, I'm going to unpack all the details of the Betty and Barney Hill incident, including the horroring tape of their recollection of this alleged encounter. And I'll also say I completely understand how absolutely insane this stuff sounds. Even as I sit here right now. It can so easily just sound preposterous to me. So before we dive in super deep, I want to highlight some of the things that make this case incredibly harder

Well as a gentleman the name of doctor Benjamin Simon. He's a psychiatrist in the Boston area, and he was called on to ended you psychoanalyze and if the die Betty Dell and Bonnydill, welcome doctor Silon to our program.

Doctor Silon.

Yes, this stop from the beginning.

When did you first ended the story of Benny and Barnie, don't you?

Late sixty three?

They were hunting in they lived a two hours or so, which seemed to bother them, but to which they could not account.

Well.

Bonnie's shiptims had begun just after they had this. Opposed of fighting, Betty had responded by a series of means extending over a week or more or at night marriage quality. They had no idea what had happened, if anything, during these two hours.

What should have been a relaxing drive in the middle of the night on their way home from a delayed honeymoon, was interrupted by something extremely eerie. As Betty looked out the passenger side window, she saw a bright object in the sky, moving sporadically. At first, Betty thought it was a star, then Barney thought I was a satellite. Eventually they became so curious Barney pulled the car over to

He was horrified.

Almost instantly, he ran back to the car and sped off in a panic. Betty and Barney both initially remembered a haze coming over them, and what they described as a strange series of beeping sounds.

And then abruptly a jump in time.

When they came to they were still driving, but the first road sign they saw indicated they were over thirty five miles away.

From just moments ago.

This missing time they experienced bothered the both of them. Here's Betty Hill again explaining the instance of lost time that both her and Barney experienced.

He put the car into GEA and we went speeding down the highway. Barney said, when he came back, the craft had followed and was now over the car.

So I looked up.

I looked out the window. All I could see was something black, and at that point there was a series of b being clowns and the car vibrated, and Bonnie and I stopped talking. We drove along. There were spots that I recognized they were familiar to me. Bonnie left Root three, he turned on to Route one seventy five and was still speeding along when all of a sudden, Bonny slammed on the brakes, the car came to a

Barney and Betty gave the same story, and that the dory was besides the like the story that had been written up by the NYCAP investigator, there were no significant difference. In fact, factually no differences between the three did they gave consciously, They gave the exactly the thing story. There was no difference that they both shared the same experience.

All the way.

They were visited by officers from the Air Force who questioned them about the missing time. They seemed to really push on that particular part of the story. How could you travel thirty five miles with no memory of it? The officers also inquired about nitrates, but the only thing the Hills could think of that was strange in their car was a few shotgun shells from Barney's gun and

This stuff could cause it. Either way, they were reaching for anything that made sense.

They had six months of hypnosis sessions with doctor Benjamin Simon. At times both of them were so distressed over what was occurring that he feared that it might increase the level of trauma, so he wanted to work through them on reducing that level of trauma. In the beginning, he took them separately, and he reinstated amnesia at the end of each session so they couldn't share information.

During World War II, doctor Benjamin Simon served as the Army's chief of Neuropsychiatry. He used something called regression therapy more commonly known today as hypnosis in an attempt to extract more detail from their alleged encounter. In regression therapy sessions like this one, doctor Simon guides the PA and points them towards the source of their traumas very deep in their subconscious.

For sleep. You will unfeed anxious war is fat, but he will remember everything, and you will tell me everything.

Yes.

Through several months of sessions, he slowly helped Betty and Barney Hill remember what happened during their lost time.

Betty said, look, there's the thar moving. And then I pulled over to the side of the road. Betty passed his binoculars to meet. You can see the rows of waidows. All right. He can't hear any sound. You don't sound whatever. Alright, he tad no noise. I want to hear a jet. Why do you want to hear a jet? Because Betty is making me mad because he shined it.

Look at that.

It's straining that it's not a plane. Look at it, and I keep thinking it's got to be.

Since these events, both Betty and Barney Hill have passed away, even though they lived in the Northeast. This was during the height of the civil rights movement, and because Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple, they did not want to be in the spotlight for their abduction story, so they didn't even discuss it with their friends. The story only became public after a reporter for the Boston Globe got a hold of some notes that a UFO

So you could argue that either.

The concept of time loss and hovering crafts that make no sound all started right here and then evolved into pop culture in such a way that literally hundreds of other people in the years following began applying the same idea to their own claims, or that whatever they did experience that night truly involved those things.

Either way, it started right here.

If Betty and Barney Hill were making all this up or simply hallucinating, then they still literally created the concept of time loss and aircrafts that don't make noise. Maybe they did truly experience this and everyone else is making up their stories and were simply influenced by Betty and Barney Hill, Or maybe there's a legitimate common thread here. The following is the tape from Betty and Barney Hill's regression therapy sessions and I must warn you it is

I've got to get my gug.

All right, definitely calm now way back, you see we lack you will not have to make in the outside.

At this point in the tape, Barney again becomes overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. This is actually why he started seeing a psychiatrist in the first place. Ever since he saw this UFO, he'd been plagued with severe anxiety, and his first psychiatrist couldn't figure it out until he met doctor Simon.

Keeps his memory, you feel you have to get your gune its fund.

Of harm, and you sell.

I how couldn't the tncle might come?

Did I get it?

Did I get back into calm?

Did I put it?

Did I call it?

Is it?

I get out.

Where the bonca is?

I walk it out.

And I because the road never even it up there anything now I know and there plus we did to sing it. But it's not going to hurt you.

Go on.

I can see it chilts toward me, tilted as much does it looks like Now when you say tilted, did you see it?

Looks like a big handcake.

With windows and lights and rolls of windows like a commercial clinging. They're not like a commercial plane because they curved around to the size of this pancake. Green eyes are there always, the eyes are there, and they're telling me I don't have.

To be afraid.

How did you see these figures so clearly as that district. I was looking at him with binoculars. Yeah, his eyes were planted.

I see it.

Oh his eyes head did this.

Creature, this leader is telling me something? How how did he getting it to you? I can see it in his spades?

You would see you move?

Yes, now the tip start moving's going. He's telling you something and he's looking at me. How could you'd be doing? He was telling you that guy there was the guys you more. What did he tell you? Stay there and keep looking? That's keep looking and stay there and just keep looking.

Yes, just keep looking? He could you hear eachell? Oh, I got a pulling pinoculars. Wait for my eyes because if I don't, I'll.

Just keep staying there. Look you heary tell you that?

Oh?

No, he didn't say it.

You felt you tell it.

I know you did.

Yeah, stay there, he saying to you, I'll taking my head and pulled up a dock.

Little boy, God give me his tread all right, dun't work job, give me dake.

I gotta get away.

All right, Calm down, I'm getting.

So what was it that Barney was actually looking at through the binoculars. According to him, it was like whatever he was seeing was communicating with him from up in the sky. Barney got back in the car and drove down the road with Betty in the passenger seat to get out of there.

They sleep a little over. Ounce we'll get put all right.

I don't have to be agreed. But they won't.

Talk to me. Who won't talk to you? The man they are standing in the road, is there an accident down the road?

They stumbled upon a strange roadblock out in the middle of nowhere.

Where are you?

You're in the car? I sat a good food ran and they were standing in that highway, and I say, strange. I am only thinking of mental pictures because my eyes are cold, and I think I am going.

Up.

Doctor Benjamin Simon's process was a slow one, but throughout six months of therapy, he was able to piece together the whole story of the roadblock, with Bonnie only remembering pieces of it at a time.

I don't want to be operating. You don't want to be operated on? What makes you think of an operation? I was thinking about this, and I was lying on my stomach pit looking with each end of the road. At what point did they played? They took me and carried me this ramp. I was playing on the table and my client was opening, and I thought, are putting a pepper around my prior tribes. If I keep real quiet and you're real still, I won't think hard and it will be over.

In all these sessions, Barney never fully remembers what happened on the table he.

Was put on.

I opened my eyes and there's the car and the lights are on and it is not running, and I see Betty is coming down the raid. He gets him to the car, and I am grinning at her, and she is grinning back at me, and we both seem so elated. How funny, I have no reason to fair. And we look with him, and I think a bright moan, and I laugh and say, well, there it goes. I never believed in flying starters, but I don't know.

I don't know where they came from.

You wish you had gone with them?

Yes?

Well, yeah, very interesting coats some distant plant. All right, they'll stop there. It'll be calm and relaxed. You'll forget everything we have had on me until I asked you to recall it again.

And they wait down?

Wow, I can't little to three?

Can you bring me in here?

Ten minutes?

Top three?

Yes, how do you hail?

All right? Don't continue that.

We wait from today.

Just like Barney, Betty underwent her own hypnosis sessions. The anxiety that Betty was experiencing came in the form of vivid dreams, and these started immediately after the night of the incident.

I don't know where we are.

Hell, don't you even know how?

I'm just assure you feeling your so that happens. I'm not really sed to afraid.

Why are you crying if you're not afraid? I was afraid when I thought the bit of the rose, the man in the rope.

Tell me about the men in the mass.

That's all right, now, you're safe here. Tell me about the men in the roads. We went out of this narrow road. It was these men.

Standing in the highway.

He sat the casts. These fatis would come up to this pass.

I get real scared.

Fannie tried to fat the cast. He did what did he try to? Sat the car at walk fats just the opposite cat doors.

Go off.

You can remember everything, though, he says, don't be afraid. You don't form any reason to be afraid. Went not great to pause you.

We just wanted to use the path with a champ of rope, which would take you a Saudi back it put you with your cass.

You'll be I give way. These mens focutingh he had an accent.

He's a dish an ex So there was Jeff's orgy.

We came to that's clearing. The object was on the grab. The object was on the room.

Yeah, I think it was a state.

What I was watching in the sky.

The same craft that she saw in the sky was now on the ground and the clearing. And according to Betty, she was being guided by these men towards a ramp leading up into the object.

They're taking me up to the as.

They had a lot of I don't know what's going to happen. I don't want to coach. I go up the ramp.

That I go inside. There's a roue and not a man. Hevin's end, but he tells me to any goshomery to ask.

Kind of in the middle of the room is its tables. I lie down and the extrav.

Has a little needle in his hand.

This video that anythner I've ever seens. I asked him what he starts to fill with this, and he that he just wants to.

Foot it in my fadle. I don't, I know it will hurt. Oh still, so it's so anything.

I paid my face and I'm crying, and I tell her to get hurting, and that leaders so.

As this s foot of my eyes and he says, I'll be all.

Right, I won't seal it, and all the case goes away. I asked the leader, I said, why did they shake the fatlet nagel?

And he said it was a pregnancy sis. I don't know what they expected, but that was no fregnancy fist.

The rational question starts to become is she just remembering a nightmare or is she being haunted by fragmented memories of something that actually happened. What's interesting, though, is that either version of this is totally bizarre. If she was of sound mind, like everyone who knew her has said. For her to be to abruptly experience vivid, lifelike dreams that perfectly matched that of her husband's too well, science

His binoculars that was broken.

Both of their wristwatches stopped working, weird circular marks on the truck of their car that would make a compass spin if you got close to it. These things are real, and they're heavily documented. So even if you want to say they just made all this up, you'd have to also add in that they elaborately staged this thing too, or they did experience something real and physical that wasn't an alien spacecraft and all these physical changes were a

We have heard the extraordinary personal story of Barney and Betty Hill, and a much broader discussion of the phenomenon of UFOs by a panel of authorities, some of whom insists there are no visitors from outer space, some of whom are skeptical, and some of whom believe that the only explanation to fit the facts is that there are extra terrestrial visitors. Unidentified flying objects demands serious and immediate

Here's Avi Lobe, professor of science at Harvard University.

The reports from government are interesting because the most juicy data must be classified.

He started a program called the Galileo Project to study UAPs after first contacting NASA to see if they could work together. He never got a reply, so instead of waiting around, he embarked on his own nonprofit scientific endeavor. He's raised over two million dollars to fund their team's research.

The sky is not classified. The data is classified just because the sensors used to collect it are classified. It's very intriguing that people high up in the chain of command, the head of NASA, Director of National Intelligence, not these things that appear to be intriguing. And I think what we need to do is collect new data. That's what the Galileo Project aims to do.

Their goal is to study UAPs from the ground, launching probes in the space to rendezvous with interstellar objects using some of the most advanced scientific instruments in the world.

Their ultimate goal.

Is to learn as much as possible and determine whether these objects are natural phenomena or technological in origin from another planet out in the universe.

We are designing our own instruments, instruments carried by military personnel used for national security purposes. The instruments the galie Low Project is developing. We're designed, we're optimized to detect such lata. We have full understanding of the doctor's views, and that's the path forward, rather than waiting for the government to release classified data. Because you can wait forever, it may not happen. And I don't want the government

During the height of the Cold War, the US was worried that the Soviets or.

China would break the Treaty in Place, which banned detonating nuclear bombs. In order to try and track this, the US entail a variety of sensors on multiple spacecraft, and as a result, they detected occasional bursts of gamma rays. Thinking at first they were from Russia, they dug deeper into the data and realized that these gamma rays were actually coming from distant galaxies.

They brought it to the attention of Pipelet Los Alamos that are also astronomers, and there was a scientific paper written by the group at Los Alamos basically saying these are gamma ray bursts. We don't know what their origin is, but it's definitely not on Earth. These flashes are coming

Guess what, Three out of the four do.

Not look like the rocks we had seen in the Solar System, So we should be open minded. We've been proven wrong. It may well be that some of these interstellar objects are artificial in origins.

Abby isn't shy about expressing his distaste for a large portion of the science community and how they treat the subject of UAPs. In his eyes, he's seen time and time again respected peers shying away from the concept of et life merely because of the tremendous implications of it all.

In order to adapt to the reality that we live in, we have to understand it, and that should be common knowledge. It cannot be restricted to a small.

Group of people.

People like to hear stories of actual sightings.

Here's Leslie Kane.

The Nimetz case, the famous two thousand and four incident is considered one of the most powerful cases on the record that we have.

In November of two thousand and four, the USS Nimetz aircraft carrier was conducting a training exercise off the coast of California.

For six days in a row.

They detected multiple anomalous aerial vehicles acronym AAVs that were operating in their near vicinity, basically foreign objects in the sky that shouldn't be there.

I would show on these three videos which have since become incredibly famous, there's.

A whole fleet.

Have a look on the AFA.

My god, that was stunning to me to see three videos that were in the possession of the US government that were taken by Navy pilots of UFOs. We were the ones that first broke that story into the public domain. What has now become known as the tictac.

These shaped vehicles basically stalked the aircraft carrier for days.

Here's Brian Bender.

Pilots are flying off the aircraft carrier doing their drills, and these tictacs are just flying circles around them, flying at enormously high speeds, speeds that they can't even really begin to keep up with them if they wanted to.

No sense from any.

Of the radar.

If there's an.

Engine, it's not giving off any heat. Going from the service of the ocean to seventy thousand feet in a couple seconds, which would make any aircraft we know blow up.

What is that?

How do they do that?

How were they flying that way?

In twenty seventeen, the videos were leaked in the massive articles put forth by Politico and The New York Times corrected. A fuzzy black and white video shows a large tic tac shaped object. The pilot looks onto it with the camera, loses it, then locks back in before it speeds off to the left out of frame.

It was like flipping a switch from USO as being sort of a joke, and maybe some people understood it, but unless you research it, you don't really get it. And it's just sort of like roswell and whatever to a switch to saying our government knows these are real and they're studying them and they want to find out more.

Yeah, you might seem like next to me, second yet closer.

I sat down with one of the radar specialists working on the USS Princeton when the tic tac object was captured by fighter pilots.

Fifteen and a half years in those same waters. This was the first time I had ever seen anything like this.

This is Kevin Day, retired senior radar operator for the US Navy.

Woke up in the morning, had coffee, You went up the combat getting ready for the air defense exercise. Our aircraft was still on the beach, the ships were out there and we were just getting ready for the operational exercise. We're out there for a training exercise. San Diego Coast is here. San Clemente Island's up north, and we're off in the playground area in the water right off the coast. We don't have any weapons loaded, and it's all safe.

During a standard naval training exercise, Kevin was below deck of the USS Princeton when he noticed objects appearing on his radar screen that shouldn't have been there.

He was just sitting there.

I just tracked it.

We all kind of thought, well, maybe it's civilian and they just forgot some test or something they were doing. Had them on radar, and we put them on the data links, reported them to the beach and gave our voice reports and said, hey, we're seeing these things. If you're worried about them, let us know. So if anyone was concerned about them. They have their data and we give heads up and everything. Over the night, I was saying to myself, if these objects, whatever they are, show

Safety of flight was and is the primary concern. It's Kevin's job to detect any anomalies in the air that may pose.

A threat to the pilots.

These aircraft cost tens of millions of dollars to manufacture. Not only would a mid air collision put the military out of one of the most expensive jets on Earth, but more importantly, it would expose the pilots themselves to a very real risk of injury or death.

I didn't want the aircraft to launch off and get involved with these objects, whatever the hell they were, and end up causing the mid air incident. If we have an air incident, someone's going to ask both you and me, why the how we didn't say something about it.

Part of Kevin's responsibilities during this mission was to guide his pilot to the next rendezvous point. But this training exercise was interrupted and the pilots were ordered to get closer to the objects and try to figure out what these things were.

They'd come from outer space, lower Earth orbit, go to twenty eight thousand feet right off the coast of Catalina, and then they would start going between us and the coast, right through our operating area, disappearing off the radars right by Guadelupe Island off Mexico. Whatever that object was drop right down to the surface of the water. These things were breaking the sounder, but there was no big move. Freaked us all out. We didn't even know how to

Just started circling.

It was so outside of our experience we didn't know what to do. He went chasing it. They did a little dog fight down by those surfaces of the water. His wingmen, he left her up high. They looked like about a fifty foot long giant tic tack, pure white, no doors, no windows, no, nothing, same size of his aircraft. Proximately, whatever that object was went to fast Eagles assigned cap station the exact latitude, longitude and altitude it stopped. How in the hell didn't know where that cap point was?

For the spaceship space cod white listen name a habitat and when das like.

Rich smokers ain't need.

A weed player did take on a lean it.

She've been on the gen. This is a bean bag. I've been going Gene because her cool.

Right now.

She was over spending up. She've been talking Yo Japan, the bens of very T shirt sleeve, budding up, top ten of vert riding.

Then youther, you gotta bend down and saying the parp peller we spended die cap and good sweaters.

Drive john Nae and nine helped her.

It was booming out of guys.

We are not the devil.

High Strange is an eighth part series released weekly for free every Thursday. But if you'd like to bene the whole series right now, you can subscribe to tendorfoot plus on Apple Podcasts to get all the episodes right now. Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange, and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email

Our cover art is by Polygon.

This episode features the song space Cadet by metro Booman featuring Gunna, written by Wesley Tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler, Wayne Alan Ritter and Jack Queis Webster, performed by metro Booman featuring Gunna courtesy of Republic Records under license from Universal Music Enterprises for metro Booman and three hundred and Entertainment for Gunna Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station sixteen, Beck

Thanks for listening.