Junior

there was a couple Partey in Betty Hill. I got to know them rather well and invited them to dinner one night. And after dinner we were sitting in the living room just talking generalities, and all of a sudden, out of absolutely nowhere, Barney started to tell the story of something that had happened to them, oh maybe six months or eight months earlier. It was the story of their abduction by aliens. It was jaw dropping. I mean, it was nothing that I had any reason to believe

apart from there saying it. But I mean there's been no clues whatsoever. Nobody had whispered about. You know, Barney and Betty had this adventure. They just started to talk, and it was compelling. They talked about driving in their car and coming down the highway and seeing lights flashing. Somehow the lights urged them to pull over from there. In their telling of the story, it developed into their being taken out of the car and into I guess

the spaceship and physically examined. Betty sort of laughed about it, saying that she figured later that they went back up into the heavens of wherever from whence they had come, And we're reporting to their boss of the creatures on Earth that the male of the species is black, the female is white, and the offspring is this little sauce and shaped brown what what we know as a dog.

In their separate hypnosis sessions, Betty and Barney Hill told remarkably similar stories about being abducted and brought aboard an alien spacecraft. Last episode, we looked at what we now know about memory and hypnosis. Simply put, the stories they told while under hypnosis can't be regarded as an accurate recall of a real event. But if the abduction didn't happen, how were their stories so similar? I'm Toby Ball, This

is strange. Arrivals Episode six, Jr. At the time of their hypnosis sessions in Dr Benjamin Simon believed that the source material was Betty's dreams can nights after this happened, I had a series of dreams for five nights. Each dream is different, which later I found I was a recall of what it happened, and the dreams were depicting what you just described to me at that point. What do you do? Where? When is it? Is it starting? Is Bonnie trouble by all of this is Bonnie as

his life pattern change? Has his mood changed at all? Actually the first thing I did, but each during the next day I wrote down what I could remember my dream the following day, which would be and every time I had after So we're talking, and I wrote, I made a record on the thirty eight years to the day, and then I took and quote him away. And then later several months later, I talked to my supervise about the meaning of dreams and that she said, well, maybe

it happened. That was Betty Hill talking with folklorist John Horrigan during their hypnosis sessions. Betty told Dr Simon about the nightmares that she had had over the course of five nights after the UFO encounter. Dr Simon new Barney had suffered from anxiety prior to the encounter, but Betty

didn't seem to have a similar prior psychological issue. Working on the assumption that the abduction had not literally occurred, he wondered if maybe these dreams had some connection to distress she was showing under hypnosis as we heard last week. He also began to wonder if she had been telling Barney the details of these dreams. Could that be why his story matched hers. He asked her if she had talked to anyone about her dreams. This is Dr Simon

on the Larry Glick radio show. In she said, oh, yes, my supervisor, my sister when we got to work with some home and have tea together, and I told her might be And she said that it was my supervisor who said, Betty, how you know all these how do you know it isn't true? This is planning the scene. Now, that had to be true. Not only had she told someone about her dreams, that person had suggested the possibility that they were more than dreams, that maybe they were memories.

She also told them that the dreams had been so remarkable that she had written them down. Dr Simon recognized this as a great opportunity, so I directed her to bring in her dreams, that she would find them and bring them in the next session. She brought them and they were fully typed up by herself at the time they occurred. That's where you important one. In November, less than two months after their encounter with the UFO, Betty Hill wrote an account of her dreams in a document

titled Dreams or Recall. She began this document by writing that she was going to describe her dreams in chronological order of the story, which was not the order she had dreamt them in. With a few minor discrepancies. She related the same story that she had told under hypnosis, the turn off the main highway, the figures in the road, the experience on the spacecraft, even Barney's dentures, and the

discussion about squash. It is, in all important ways indistinguishable from the story she told under hypnosis and on a camp. From inspection of that, with her story, they were exactly alike with one difference. But in the dreams she went up told the r hampstanding being embodiable. That's all. They were exactly alone and still were not accept fully that they were the same. There was another discrepancy that we

will look at it in a few minutes. But Dr Simon was struck not only by the nearly identical stories, but also by the way that her hypnotically recovered story seemed to reflect a kind of dream logic. By the way, when I say dreams without not only referring facts she had read, that she'd written them down, but the whole structure of the story was out of a dream. There many contradictures inconsistent with a perfect or righted dream. In fact,

they're part of the nature of dreams. And so this thing was clearly filled out from me, the concept of the dream by a lot of inner materials dreams. Her recall was for Dr Simon the key to the whole abduction narrative. That gave me an answer at that fact that the fantastic story was her dreams, and we could hit that check very well with reality. So I was satisfied. I didn't have to look any further for us exclamation, I wouldn't have to accept them. But connections they existed

of space describe whatever they were. There is no question that her dreams and her hypnosis testimony are the same story told with very minor variations. This can be explained in two different ways. The first is the explanation that Dr Simon preferred Betty had these intense dreams and told Barney and others about them. When they eventually were hypnotized, Betty related her dreams, and Barney told what he imagined his experience would have been based on what he'd heard

about her dreams. Is it plausible that Betty's string of dreams were caused by the u f O citing on the night of September I definitely wouldn't say that there's a reason to believe that something that you've dreamed bears a straightforward relationship to something that happened in real life. They're usually related to something that's happening in your real life,

but they're often sort of mixing together different elements. So it might take a feeling that you've had, maybe you haven't recognized and kind of dramatized it in a story. I'm Alice rob and I'm the author of the book Why We Dream. The dreams that people tend to talk about and tell their friends about are the more dramatic ones,

and of course those do happen. The reason that we have those crazy dreams is that when we're dreaming, our brain is in this different state where the emotion centers of our brain are very activated, but the rational centers that usually would keep those emotions in check are more dormant. So it is consistent with our understanding of how dreams work that Betty would have nightmares that made a story out of the anxiety she felt during their UFO encounter

in the White Mountains. The other possibility is that Betty's dreams were her mind's way of bringing to the surface events that had happened the night of the encounter, memories that the alien abductors had somehow caused her and Barney to forget. If this was the case, the hypnosis sessions were uncovering actual memories of their abduction. Even if the hypnotically recalled stories weren't exactly what happened in every detail, the basic fact that they were brought aboard of spacecraft

was confirmed. That's the argument if you believe the abduction story is real. I asked Alice rob if there was any research about whether dreams could conjure up memories that people had lost. Through him Nisia. The only piece of research I can think of that involves dreams of people with amnesia was this study about twenty years ago by Robert Stickold, who was studying dreams and memory consolidation. This is one of the first real scientific studies of dreams.

He had people come into his lab and played Tetris for hours and then had them report their dreams and found that they would have dreams of Tatris, or dreams of tiles, or dreams that were sort of influenced by the game. So he included some regular, healthy undergraduates, and he also included some patients with amnesia. These were people with no short term memory. They were unable to remember things that had happened even just hours before. It was

a small sample. It was only I think six or seven people, so I wouldn't want to read too too much into this, but they did have elements of the game in their dreams, even if they couldn't consciously remember, like the rules. They would have to relearn how to play Tetris every time. As Alice said, you can only put so much stock in a study of this size, but there is an indication that someone might be able to recall things in a dream that were lost due

to amnesia. But again, as with any dream, it's not going to be a replay of actual events. Like hypnosis. It's a more complicated process. And it's not that surprising that Betty would think that her dreams were a recall of an actual event, and that those dreams would eventually function essentially as memories. There's plenty of history of people giving great significance to their dreams. I think dreams absolutely

can affect how we remember things. I mean, dreams can be such powerful and emotional and lifelike experiences in ways that science can't fully explain. It makes sense to wonder sort of where they came from, and there are lots of examples of people undergoing religious conversions or changing their beliefs after powerful dreams. To me, it seems likely that

Dr Simon's instinct was correct. Betty had dreams that were a reaction to her experience in the White Mountains, then under hypnosis, she recalled those dreams as if they had actually happened. This fits with what we know about dreams. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any scientific evidence that dreams can recall lost memories In the vivid detail that Betty's described, but there are some discrepancies in the details of Betty's dreams, Betty's and Barney's hypnosis testimony,

and their later memories. These are most noticeable in the way the descriptions of the aliens changed over time. After the break, strange arrivals will return. In a moment. Take a second and bring up a mental image of an alien. Most people will probably think of something like this small body, big head, with an enlarged cranium, as if to accommodate a huge brain, oversized oval or catlike eyes, diminished nose and mouth, no ears to speak of. This description is

what people in the UFO community call a gray. Popular culture has settled on Gray's is what aliens look like. Think close encounters of the third kind. This conception originates at least in part with the Hills description of the aliens they encountered, but they didn't initially describe the beings they encountered in this way. Their description changed as time went on. This is from Betty and Barney's ninety six appearance on the Alan Douglas Show. What was the dream

like that you, gentlemen? Well, actually, so we found out right that my dreams were very, very similar. There's the information that we have changed. There were some minor differences, and I think probably the most important difference is that in my dream I may see I guess said um, and I say, more human then they were in dreams or recall. This is how she describes the alien. During this time, I became conscious of several things. First, only one man speaks in English, with a foreign accent, but

very understandable. The others say nothing. I note their physical appearance. Most of the men are my height, although I cannot remember the height of the heels on my shoes. None are as tall as Marnie, so I would judge them to be five ft to five ft four inches. Their chests are larger than ours. The noses were larger, longer than the average size, though I have seen people with noses like theirs, like Jimmy Durranty's. Their complexions were of a great tone, like a great paint with black bass.

Their lips were of a bluish tin. Hair and eyes were very dark, possibly black. And the men were all dressed alike, presumably in uniform of a light navy blue color with a gray shade to it. They wore trousers and short jackets that gave the appearance of zippert sport jackets, but I am not aware of zippers or buttons for closing. Shoes were a low slip on style resembling a boot. I cannot remember any jewelry or insignia. They were all wearing a military cap similar to Air Force, but not

so broad on top. They were very human in appearance, not frightening. But this was not how she would describe them in her hypnosis sessions. Later, in response to a written question, apparently trying to address this discrepancy, she wrote the following reply, Her description is in keeping with the standards of the mid nineties sixties, but it's a little jarring to hear today. In my dreams, I felt I made the humanoids more like us than they really were.

Under hypnosis, I described them as mongoloid, a certain type of retardation, with broad, flat faces, large slanting eyes, small flattened nose. Their body seemed out of proportion with their larger chest areas. Barney too initially described the beings as looking close to human, but as time passed this also changed. His first glimpse of the aliens came during the encounter at Indian Head when he sees the occupants of the craft looking out at him through the bank of windows.

There are the roll of windows, rolls windows, just a huge row of windows. Barney describes the saucer occupants in a way that to him conjures menace. Would you see clearly yes to his face like that, I can think of his round, I think of you read him Irishman. As an African American working in Boston in the late fifties and early sixties, he associated the Irish with racist hostility. He's surprised that this quote unquote Irishman seems friendly. I

don't know why. I think I know why because Irish are usually hostile to new grow and when I see my friend Gus person, I react to it, I thinking I will be from me. He focuses on another figure two, one that seems more sinister. I think this one that is looking over the children, the evil face exactly. Barney had enlisted in the Army during World War Two. The Nazi figure is another symbol of threat. I'm going to

see these figures that clearly about distance. I was looking at him with the Marcos Oh I think it's safe to say that his descriptions here while under hypnosis are probably reflective of his emotional reaction, not his visual perception. I as we have heard, Barney kept his eyes tightly shut for most of his time on the craft, but he did open them briefly while he was being examined on the table. I saw this kind of grayish color, and this is I think, because most people they're not.

We saw a little green men. And they were not green men. They were a grayish, metallic kind of gray in color. And I might also say that I'm quite sure they were not wearing a mask, rather any kind of apparatus over the head for breathing purposes, because I could see what would have been out a thin line without a lip muffle that when potty when opened, there was a membrane inside that fluttered really red at the

end of the mouth the towel, and this fluttered. And this seemed to be a way that they communicated with one another with a very peculiar kind of bumbling. Uh. This description maintains the threatening feel of Barney's earlier descriptions of the Irishman in the Nazi, but this being is clearly not human, and unlike the beings Betty described in earlier episodes, Barney's doesn't seem likely to exchange and friendly banter. Betty and Barney worked with a new Hampshire artist named

David Baker to create drawings of the aliens. Baker wrote the Hills a letter on October two. It seems that he had shown them preliminary sketches and they had apparently been dissatisfied. In the letter, he tries to address their objections, and I think it gives some insights into their perceptions of the aliens. He writes eyes slanted opening, rounding sides

of face, indicating peripheral vision. Anatomy for such eyes would indicate bone structure or to protect such in large eyeballs as indicated, would extend cheekbones, round curve of ron facial plate, giving a look to eyes, if not so much oriental as like a cat's eyes. Someone, maybe Betty, has written

yes in the margin next to this observation. Baker, probably referring to Barney's description of a membrane in one of the aliens mouths, theorizes that the aliens might be wearing some kind of protective film that would distort their features, much like a bank robber wearing a stocking over his head, pushing his nose flat, pulling his mouth tight, and blurring facial details. This theory is met simply with a question mark. Baker's completed drawings are held at the Milne Special Collections

and Archives at the University of New Hampshire. They portray what you'd expect, strange figures with large eyes, clad in the garb that Betty and Barney described, caps, scarves, jackets. Intriguingly, there's also a haziness to the images is if visually representing the uncertain process of recall. When you consider that this is an attempt to portray beings that they considered to be real, the sketches are pretty eerie, But there's something else in the archive. The Betty and Barney Hill

papers are spread among some fourteen boxes. Most of the boxes hold some combination of papers, photographs, and documents. Oversized Box four, though, holds a very strange artifact, the sculpture of an alien bust. It's called JR. As best as they've been able to figure out, it's made of some kind of resin molded over a window screen core. It's

putty colored with a hint of green. Believe it or not, this bus was sculpted by Marjorie Fish, the same Marjorie Fish who constructed the models that pointed to Zeta reticuli as the origin of the star map. She sculpted the bust based on David Baker's drawings as well as her own, which she also made in consultation with Betty. Contrasted to Baker's drawings, marjorie sketches are very clear and simple, like something you'd see in a well drawn comic book. To

see Junior in person is jarring. It has a presence. Here's Betty showing Junior to John Horrigan during the interview. This is Junior. Now. This is a casado composit of the individual differences. They do not look alike. There's as much different between among them is there is any group of people. But this basically shows a characteristics allowed your eyes, nose, mouth, no protruding pot No, but this one this is because he fell off the podium in St. Louis. Okay. So

Buddy's okay though, but he hasn't pronounced brown Ridge. Yeah. Um, as you said, a pug knows um more or less a very small orifice for a mouth, and actually, instead of white's actually have yellow eyes and eyes I see irishes and pupil. We put the yellow in Okay to emphasize him. I was gonna say he needs vizine or or he looks like he has malaria, but okay, okay.

Now Junior has been evaluated by I don't know how many physical anthropologists, but what he looks like now, if we continue along the path of evolution, this is what we're going to look like in years. Junior looks like an early prototype of a gray It's cranium is enlarged, but not as much as you'd expect. The eyes are big and somewhat at an angle, but again not as

exaggerated is what we're used to now. Also, the eyes have gray irises, black pupils, and as you just heard, the whites of the eyes are a kind of lemon yellow. The nose and mouth are barely there. The mouth is just four lines etched into the face. It makes me wonder if maybe this was more of a product of what she quote unquote remembered most about the aliens instead of what they looked like. The eyes had drawn her

the rest of the face was an afterthought. Betty would later claim that the grays that we think of now were not what she saw. Let's just go back to those type of entities. Um, they were your classic alien, gray shaped cat like No, no, they weren't. Okay, human being there were, there are a form of human beings. Did they have cat like or chestire like eyes? They had larger eyes than ours, smaller nose, a smaller mouth, no protruding part of the era. Noa nothing like these

classic grays. You see your Whitley streamers. Da, I'll never say nos. I don't know what the okay she said. What she saw was closer in appearance to a tribe of indigenous people living near Antarctica that she learned about at a presentation she attended an Exeter, New Hampshire. Junior in fact, looks to be some kind of midpoint between

a human and the stereotypical gray alien. I understand her point that what she saw isn't exactly what we think of now, but her description of the aliens as shown by Junior is an important step in creating the public understanding of what an alien looks like. The question that this begs is if they didn't have an actual encounter. Where did they get this idea of an aliens appearance?

Well maybe from TV skeptoid host Brian Dunning. So for a long time the people have been pointing to this episode of The Outer Limits called the Bollerro Shield as probably what inspired Barney Hill's description under hypnosis of what these alien characters look like, because it came out at the right time that it's it's likely that he would have seen this on TV or possible anyway, and there wasn't really anything else in popular culture that might have

informed his idea of what an alien would look like besides this. I mean, you could just do a Google search for the Bollerro Shield and you'll see what this alien looks like, and it's like, yeah, it looks kind of alien like, but it doesn't really look all that much like our concept of what we think of as a gray alien today. The Bolerro Shield episode of The Outer Limits ran twelve days before the Hill's first hypnosis session.

The story is about a devious woman who tries to steal futuristic technology from a benign, highly advanced alien, only to have her plan backfire. Can you read my mind? Even? Do you see it. I cannot read your mind. I cannot even understand your language. The first thing you have to understand about the alien in this episode is that

it looks like a person wearing a mask. It's pretty ridiculous by today's standard, and the alien doesn't really resemble Junior, but you could describe it as having oversized eyes, negligible nose, no ears, and a thin mouth. So the descriptions seem similar, even if they don't look too much alike again, Brian Dunning.

But then recently I heard from one of my listeners, just in the last year or so that they found an older episode from the Twilight Zone from April ninety two called hocus Pocus and Frisbee, and that had an alien character in it that looked way more like what we think of as a gray alien and way more like what Barney Hill described. Man. Last time I saw anything that looked like you, I've been four days on the corn jug and the timing for that was interesting.

That came out two years before they did the hypnosis, so after they say the incident happened. So it's possible that that Betty could have seen it, or that Barney could have seen it. Or that they both watched it. Who knows so right now, that's that's kind of my favorite explanation of where their description came from and why it happens to match what we think of as a typical gray alien today. Again, the alien here is basically a guy in a mask, but Brian is right that

it is more like what Betty and Barney described. In particular, the noses just two slots, and the mouth is essentially not there. Betty and Barney claimed not to have seen the episode of The Outer Limits, and I haven't found anything that says whether or not they saw the Twilight Zone episode. I don't think the Twilight Zone theory was around while Betty was still alive. Regardless, there are opportunities to see an ad or an image from a television

show without watching the whole show itself. What does this all mean, Well, there was a process that began with the actual UFO citing and continued through Betty's dreams, the hypnosis sessions, and various attempts to produce likenesses on paper and through sculpture. The description of the aliens changed over this period of time, which is not unexpected given what

we know about memory. But most critically, the change in description from human like creature is two more exotic aliens happened during hypnosis sessions, and that change reflected popular conceptions of aliens in television shows at the time. It shows how the Hill story might have changed in response to

outside cultural factors. It could be that this process was towards an ever more accurate understanding of what they'd seen, but the simpler explanation is that the description of these figures was reflective of their expectation of what they would

see on a UFO rather than a memory. While we have spent time looking at the story that the Hills recalled under hypnosis, none of this really reflects on the original continuously recalled memories of the trip on the night of September, the night that they saw light in the sky that eventually became a craft hovering above a field. Dr Simon believed that the abduction and was from Betty's dreams, but he felt that something had happened to the Hills

that night. The question is what next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey.

Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to the miln's Special Collections and archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y A M in Norwich, Connecticut, John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project blue Book. Learn more about the show over at GRIMM and mil dot com. For more podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app Double Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.