Men In The Road

have described objects of substance and high speed. One case, Polished, reported their plane was buffeted by an object which pest them at five miles an hour. Obviously this was a solid object, and I believe it was from outer space. On the night of September Ninette Betty and Barney Hill, a married couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, journeyed home from Montreal.

As they passed through New Hampshire's White Mountains, they had a UFO sighting that began with a light in the sky and edded with a close up encounter in a field near a tourist area known as Indian Head. But was there more to this story? They arrived home at least two hours later than they had expected. What had happened during that time? I'm Toby Ball and This is

Strange Arrivals Episode two Men in the Road. Shortly after the uf encounter, on the night of September, searching for answers, Betty Hill went to the Portsmouth Public Library, where she checked out a book titled The Flying Saucer Conspiracy by Major Donald E. Keyhoe. That was Major Keyhoe speaking at

a press conference at the beginning of this episode. He was an Air Force major and the co founder of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena or NIECAP, a prominent UFO investigation organization in the nineteen fifties and sixties. We'll look at NIECAP later in this episode. The Flying Saucer Conspiracy was published in nineteen fifty three. The basic story is that Major Keyho investigates UFO encounters and the

government's knowledge of them. The government, of course, tries to thwart his investigation as a piece of Cold War paranoia. It's fascinating. As a work of nonfiction, it doesn't hold up very well. This excerpt gives you a taste of what the book is like. The moon could have been inhabited long ago, been abandoned as conditions changed. It's creatures could have reached Mars and established a civilization there to

return home only at frequent intervals. For perhaps they used the Moon as a space base for travel to other planets, or there may never have been a Moon race at all. The lunar sphere could have been occupied by outsiders from Mars, for example, or from a planet beyond our Solar System. Gradually, a base could have been built up, most of it

underground to avoid meteor falls. The intermittent use of the Moon is a space base would explain the strange lights of the past two centuries, as well as the mysterious radial cracks or lines which might be caused by intense heat from blast offs. This unknown race might have regarded with increasing interest our own world. They too, may fear Our explorations. There was another possible answer. The creatures on the Moon might be a combination of several races from

other planets. We might never know until we reached the Moon, unless one of their spaceships landed on Earth. You have to keep in mind that when this book was written, near space was a real mystery. Our window on the planets was the lens of a telescope. We didn't have any satellites orbiting the Earth. We hadn't put a man in space, much less on the Moon. Our knowledge of our Solar system was much more in keeping with what we knew in eighteen hundred than what we know now.

You could populate the planets with whatever your imagination conceived. Eight years later, in nineteen sixty one, when Betty and Barney had their encounter, there were fewer than ten satellites in orbit. Right now we have more than forty six hundred. Near space was a far more mysterious place sixty years ago. The culture surrounding UFOs was also different. Popular interest in UFOs dates back to June, when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw nine metallic flying discs traveling at high speeds

near Mount Rainier. His story hit the newspapers two days later. The Chicago Sun, for instance, ran a two page story headlined Supersonic flying Saucers cited by Idaho pilot speed estimated at twelve hundred miles an hour when seeing ten thousand feet up near Mount Rainier. Two weeks later, in New Mexico, the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Force Base issued a press release stating that the five hundred and ninth Operations Group had recovered a flying disc that had

crashed on ranch land. The modern UFO era was underway. There's only fourteen years between those events, and Betty and Barney's experience upology was just finding its legs. Two different types of UFO stories emerged during the nineteen fifties. Part of what makes the Hills account so compelling is how drastically it differed from both of them. The first narrative involves so called contact e s, people who claim to

have met and communicated with aliens. The most famous of the contacts was an eccentric Polish born American named George adam Ski. I talked to Aaron Gullias about adam Ski and the UFO scene of the nineteen fifties. I am Aaron Gullias. I'm a history professor and writer and host of the podcast The Saucer Life, where I look at Flying Saucerer history and lore in all its various forms.

George Adamski was an interesting figure because he started off not as a flying saucer contact, but as sort of a spiritualist guru back in the nineteen twenties and thirties in California, with an organization called the Royal Order of Tibet, and he developed something he called the Cosmic Philosophy. The Cosmic philosophy was a not very remarkable mix of Eastern

philosophy and idiosyncratic Christianity. More interestingly, during Prohibition, adam Ski got permission for the Royal Order of Tibet to make wine for religious purposes. He made enough, he said, for all of southern California, and he made quite a bit of money. But prohibition ended, and with it Adamski's winemaking.

Then he in the nineteen forties, as the Flying Saucer Craze begins, writes a science fiction novel called Pioneers of Space, which has a crew of people in a rocket ship going to various planets in the Solar System and meeting Martians on Mars, and Venusians on Venus and Moon, and nights on the Moon, and all of these people in all these different civilizations have societies that are far in

advanced of what we have here on the Earth. In the early nineteen fifties, he begins taking photographs of what he claims are flying saucers. You can find adam Ski's photos on the Internet. The saucer has been identified as a model constructed from a German medical lamp and three light bulbs. In nineteen fifty two, he has a meeting in the desert with a being from a flying saucer and he communicates through gestures, and he's from the planet Venus.

The Venusians are concerned because of atomic explosions they've detected coming from the Earth that this might spell doom for the balance of the Solar System. These other civilizations have already passed beyond this stage of development that Earth is in. Not only did the Venusians come from an advanced and enlightened civilization, they were, according to Adam Ski, kind of hot. This is from an interview Adam Ski did it with

radio host long John Nevile. Yeah, a man about a fight with a seven to eight inches and I would say around a d and thirty five pounds of quite delicate hands. Uh, the tapered fingers and beautiful a very sharp eyes looked like they looked right through you. Sometimes you couldn't hardly tell what he was really a man or a woman. And the long hair waving sure resting on his shoulders. He kind of a half away smile, and put his hand down and shake and it was

a pump to pump contact anyway, and he smiled. He started telling me things and I couldn't understand, and I finally got the idea, I want to know where he's from. I pointed to the Sun and I made one or it haland Mercury named it, and then Venish and then Earth and pointed on myself and they art, and then I said, we are you from? They got the idea.

He finally pointed to the Sun and he made one orbit and saying nothing, made a second orbit and he pointed to himself and to that orbit, and that meant Venish. That's how I knew he was Venetian. It's hard to imagine anyone taking this very seriously. Back in the nineteen fifties, it was very much akin to to science fiction fandom.

And you get the impression that even when they don't believe every word of something that somebody like Adam Ski wrote, they recognize the value of his message, which honestly, I think is what Adam Ski was trying to get across the flying Saucers. We can take or leave, but his consistent message of humanity needing, needing, to ascend to a higher moral plane that predates his saucer stories, goes back to his stuff he was doing in the twenties and thirties.

So you have the contact e s spreading this story of peace, fellowship and high spiritual attainment. But there was another track of interest in UFOs what Aaron calls the nuts and bolts people, people who took a more scientific approach trying to determine what was causing these reports of unidentified craft in the skies. Among its ranks were many professionals such as journalists, scientists, and military personnel. There's also from the nuts and bolts people a deep disdain for contact.

He is um for for sort of making UFOs or flying saucers, something that's easy to laugh at, which brings us back to Major Keyhoe. Donald Kehoe wasn't the founder of NIGHTCAP, but he took control of it very quickly.

NIGHTCAP is the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon and in its earliest incarnation in nineteen fifties, it's governing board had people who had been connected with the military and intelligence and and government circles at the national level, and Donald Kehoe, who was an aviation journalist and Marine Corps major took a very common sense approach to UFOs. In a lot of ways, these are strange objects flying in our skies. They are behaving in ways that our technology can't.

The Air Force has been interested in them. Therefore, the Air Force must know something about these craft that we do not know and that they refused to tell us. So Nightcapp's mission from very early on was in attempting to get the handling of UFOs. The investigation of UFOs moved away from the Air Force toward more civilian investigation efforts to have government hearings and civilian government sponsored research into the UFO phenomenon, because the Air Force would just

keep everything secret. This secrecy is a main theme of the Flying Saucer conspiracy. Nightcap saw the Air Force's approach as being unhelpful to solving the mystery and believed that if only Congress would authorize a big research project, we might be able to get to the bottom of this and get the Air Force out of the picture and force them to maybe bring forth what they know and admit whatever the truth might be about it. But Nightcap was was very much focused on sightings on evidence on

on very detailed, careful reports from witnesses. They had no time for contact ease, They had no time for anything they saw as as silly in Nightcap would be the first group Betty and Barney Hill would reach out to with their story Strange arrivals will return in a moment. At the time of the Hills encounter, Nightcap was the most prominent UFO investigation organization in the country. They had over five thousand members in chapters across the US. By

the sixties, membership had grown to fourteen thousand. Among its ranks were many professionals such as journalists, scientists, and military personnel. After reading Donald Keyhos The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, Betty contacted Nightcap. They sent an astronomer named Walter Webb to investigate in October of n a month after the encounter. This early investigation was mostly concerned with establishing the events that we

looked at in episode one. Here's a passage from Webb's report on his meeting with the Hills, as read by an actor. It gives you a sense of his conclusions.

Following my initial six hour interrogation of the witnesses on October one, nineteen, I was of the opinion the Hills were telling the truth and that the first encounter with the UFO occurred exactly as reported, except for minor uncertainties and technicalities that must be tolerated in any such observation where human judgment is involved, i e. Exact time and length of visibility, apparent sizes of object and occupants, distance

and height of object, etcetera. Although their occupations did not qualify the witnesses as scientific observers, I was impressed by their intelligence, apparent honesty, and obvious desire to get at the facts and to play the more sensational aspects of the siding. Neither witness had read any books on the UFO subject before the siding. Mr. Hill especially had been a complete UFO skeptic before the experience. He's still to test the term flying saucer. Two things changed for Betty

and Barney after the ufone counter. First, Betty had vivid dreams of being kidnapped and brought aboard a craft. They were so unusual that she began to think they might be subconscious memories of an actual abduction. On the night of the encounter. In November, she wrote about her dreams

in a document titled Dreams or Recall. We'll take a closer look at these dreams later in the series, but in introducing the dreams, she writes, I will attempt to tell my dreams in chronic logical order, although they were not dreamed in this way, and in fact the first dream told was the last one dreamed. My emotional feelings during this part was of terror, greater than I had ever believed possible. The second thing was that Barney's health

took a turn for the worse. He developed a circular pattern of warts around his groin, His mental health deteriorated, and he began to suffer from ulcers. But he explained this during a talk she gave in Connecticut. Then Barney's health began to fail and to the point that he

became totally disabled. He would not responding the medication. His doctor thought that maybe he has some kind of emotional problem, so he sent Bonnie to a friend of his, a psychiatrist, and Biling is going in talking about his early childhood and his mother and his wild We're not al This psychiatrist was Duncan Stevens, and his office was an Exeter, New Hampshire. Here's Barney Hill from a man sixty six

appearance on the Alan Douglas Show. I had an altar that has not bothered him, but he then began to bother me, and it did not respond to any medication from the medical cospel, and so h He then decided about a possibly it had some kind of psychological origin or cause that continued so that it persisted in we maybe causing this distress with the UFO encounter was mostly ignored during these sessions, but in nineteen sixty three, Dr Stevens felt that Barney could benefit from hypnosis therapy and

referred him to the esteemed Boston based psychiatrist Dr Benjamin Simon. Dr Simon was famous for his work with returning soldiers suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Betty went along with Barney to the first appointment. This is Kathleen Martin,

Betty Hill's niece and an experienced UFO investigator. She indicated to Dr Simon that she would like to be hypnotized as well, so he agreed to hypnotize the two of them separately and to reinstate amnesia because they had amnesia for the events that occurred with Dr Fireman Umber that individually, and he also gave us amnesia at the end of reason, so that we could not remember when had happened, and that's why we couldn't talk about it. He had worked with us quite a bit, and then he opened up

the amnesias so we could what had happened. For a time, Dr Simon ensured that Barney and Betty could not recall the content of their sessions. This was to prevent further trauma and to keep them from discussing the memories that had come up under hypnosis. Eventually, Dr Simon played the tapes back to the Hills so that they could process what they had recovered during hypnotic regression. Leader tell me something.

Over the course of these sessions, a story emerged, a story that explained what had happened during the early hours of September, a story that seemed to fill in the missing time from their trip. It starts with Barney, for no apparent reason, turning off the highway. What they revealed, and they did this separately, is that somehow they found themselves on a new road. They were tall trees all around. Barney turned then onto a dirt road. It's my understanding.

Betty consciously recalled him moving the car, almost stopping them, but almost screeching the brakes and turning towards the left. And so they went down this dirt road, and standing in the dirt road were men and they were holding One of them was holding some kind of lighted thing in its hand. There was a red orange glow in the background. Again from Barney's radio interview. Can you describe

are you? Are you able to describe well? When I saw them in the headlights of the car before the lights went out, they were in dart stimular kinds of dan and I called it a uniform, which I thought as a p jacket. I also understand Allan that in critical situation we continually try to put things into the frame of reference that we can identify with as a natural thing, so that I thought of the uniforms being

much like a jacket. On March seven, during a hypno secession in Dr Simon's Boston office, Betty relived what happened on this remote stretch of road. I thought, well, you know, they in a car and the cat broke it down, or what are they doing there? And Donnie said to stop, and then he stops the calf and these had status come up to the calf. They they separated. They came up in two groups. And when they started to do that,

I get real scared. Yeah, the car motor died the cast off, and whether he started covering up val He tried to start the car. He tried to start it. And you know how a mote of a cow just turn over turn over at WoT five. Yeah, he's trying to stomach you did what. He's trying to start the car. It won't start. Because then just and I think, well,

I can't get away from this. I can if I get the car door up like a brother than wit and ide and I was thinking of and I just put my head on the car door and open up it. Just the may come up and they open it for me. And they opened the cat door. And this very big bit and this what next day is this? Who there's a couple of bits behind me. Is that this body is okay, this is a bandit each side of him and my eyes are opened. My body is still asleeps

he's lacking it. He's asleep. And then I think gonna get bad, And they go, oh the heck are these characters and what do they think that's going. Yes, So I turn aroundinized the body. I got, why don't you wake up? If he doesn't Patty attend? Should he keeps walking? I keep going a little bit further and I turned around it I say his name to get body wake up. He doesn't pay attention that the man who's walking beside me here, he says, Oh, is his name Unnie? Yes,

that's her round. I looked at this man and I said it's none of his business. So I didn't speak to him. Did we keep walking? Did I try to wake Batty up again? I can see a batty body wake up, and he doesn't. So the man said he can't ask me again. He said he's biding his name. Did I wouldn't ask him? So that he says, He says, you don't be afraid. You don't have any reason to be afraid. We wasn't I gonna have you, but we just want to do some test with a tense of

rowful women. We'll take you a body back and put you with your car. You'll be a you way back home in no time. So he was sort of reassuring it away. But I wasn't get his trusted what he said, and I wasn't sure what was going to happen, and we kept the body was told asleep, and then we came to that's clearing h and I wish it was lighter so I could get a been a pink ju

hunt up. There was a ramp and it don't want there was the object was on the grab It was I say what I was watching as the sky and there were trees and there was a pass and there was a claring at this object, just the clary I could see just about filled up filled up the clearing and they're taking me up to the object. I had a lot of a lot of I I don't know what's going to happen to like a lot of I don't want to go? Yes, I go up the ramp?

Should I go inside? These weren't Georgia Adamski's beautiful space piece next But what were they and what did they want? Next? Time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. 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 Rickicki. Walter Webb was voiced by Michael J. Weaver.

Special thanks to the MILNS 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 Bluebook. Learn more about the show over at grimm and mil dot com. For a more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H