Motion Parallax

In the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway. It's a fascinating, breath taking ride, and as your car nears the summit, there is an unforgettable view of the White Mountain National Part. One of nature's most awe inspiring worked is this giant profile of the Old Man of the Mountains, sculptured out of the granite cliffs at Franconia Knock. In the previous two episodes, we've looked at how what we know about

memory and regression. Hypnosis raised serious doubts about Betty and Barney Hill's story of alien abduction, but these doubts don't apply to the parts of the September trip that Betty and Barney remembered before hypnosis. Dr Benjamin Simon, who conducted the hypnosis sessions with the Hills said that while he believed the memories from hypnosis were from Betty's dreams, something had actually happened that night. The question is what I'm

Toby Ball and this is strange. Arrivals Episode seven, motion parallax. The Hills planned to spend the night of September in Montreal. They'd driven about two hours that morning from a motel west of Montreal and became lost in the city before deciding to drive eight hours through the night to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. UFO researcher Robert Shaefer one thing that people don't often note is that they had

been driving for a very long time. I think they had been on the road, like twelve hours or more, and if you talk about distracted drivers, that concern certainly applies here. Betty at first saw a light that seemed to be following them, and she was convinced that it was a UFO. Her excitedness gradually got Barney to be excited as well. The first stop they made to get a better look at this light was just north of Franconian Notch State Park. From episode one, Kathleen Martin, as

she watched this, and it grew larger and larger. She became very curious, so south of Twin Mountain, she asked Barney to stop by the side of the road. This was at the Mount Cleveland picnic area, and they got out of the car with binoculars and looked up at this thing in the sky. There's this period of time when they are south of Lancaster, New Hampshire, until they get close to Cannon Mountain, when the light is a long way off but seems to be getting closer and

is moving around in the sky. There are two possible explanations for this that I want to talk about. The most common among skeptics is that at this point in the journey, Eddie is seeing the planet Jupiter. But why would she think it was moving and getting closer. Robert Schaeffer, followed by skeptoid host Brian dunning Well, the road curves and the mountains are there hiding and revealing the Moon and Jupiter and anything else that they might be looking at.

Is very common in the in the history of the UFO sightings and even at the present time. But people say this object was following us. It was moving from one side of the road to the other. But again, you know, many roads, especially in mountainous areas, do not go on a straight line. They curved back and forth. It's very easy to get confused about, you know, what direction you're looking at something that isn't really in question. That's a very common thing, amount you know, UFO sightings.

I am persuaded that that is a very good explanation for the white light that they saw in the sky. I have had similar experiences myself. I've done a lot of sailing, and when you see a light in the distance and your on a boat and the boat's moving, the illusion that it's the light that's moving and not you can be extremely persuasive. I do think that that is a sufficient explanation for the white light that they reported.

I've heard that people do get confused by planets at night, but I still have a hard time believing that this misidentification of Jupiter is the beginning of the Hill encounter. Even fatigued driving dark, lonely roads at night, I just can't picture it. I attended a meeting of the Granite State Skeptics, a group in New Hampshire that gets together once a month to discuss paranormal phenomena. I brought up

that I didn't quite buy the Jupiter explanation. One of the people there, a retired Air Force officer named Steve Lundquist, had a story. So this is really about being an expert witness and people knowing or should know better, and they can still make mistakes. So just talking about myself personally, air Force pilot over three thousand hours and jets flying all over the world, amateur astronomer, and you know, in the Air Force you even get courses on you know,

aviation weather and all those sort of things. So with that sort of a background, you know, you'd think I'd know better. But one time we were in the Middle East and we were flying along mission and it was you know, the typical old dark thirty and we're flying towards Saudi Arabia and we see an aircraft in front of us, and you know, it's hard to tell exactly what kind of aircraft it is. You know, if it's by its brightness and it's really far away, it's probably

a big one. But if it's closer, it's probably a small one. And we didn't think much of it until we noticed that it was climbing and after a while it climbed pretty high, and since we couldn't paint it on ray are, we figured it was far away, so it must have been a large aircraft and far away. We're looking at the altitude that it's getting to and we're figuring to ourselves, no US aircraft can reach these altitudes. It just can't. Trigonometry actually came into the whole equation,

you know. We put its existent to see what the angle was, and we're like, wow, this thing is like up there like a hundred and twenty thousand feet. Nothing can do that. And of course as we're flying along, we're like, going, jee's a wax is awfully quiet tonight too? Yeah, one, what's up? Why is that? What's going on? Now? If I've gone back and reported to people we saw this airplane, it was doing things no aircraft we know of can do, you know, And then we said it was a UFO.

You'd probably believe me because you know, I'm an Air Force pilot, I fly, I no astronomy, I'm an engineer, I have top secret clearance all that stuff. You believe me, right. We thought about it a little bit more and we came to realize it actually was Venus. But because we've been looking for traffic. You know, when you're flying, you're always looking for what you might run into. Open the sky, we fixated on it's an aircraft. This bright light in

the sky is another airplane. We don't want to hit it. And even though it was starting to do things no other aircraft can do, in our minds, still stayed as an aircraft as opposed to Venus. Classic mistake of Venus as an aircraft. And it's like I should have known better, and I still made that mistake. There's another explanation that I find still more convincing, brought to us by Jim McDonald.

I write science fiction novels. I'm a magician, I'm an E. M. T. And I live here in the north country of Namshure. Jim's explanation relies on some of the same principles as the Jupiter explanation, but comes to a different conclusion about

the source of the light. One day on the September, to make it exactly the right date, my wife and my daughter and I all drove down Route three, following Betty and Barney's route, with a copy of Interrupted Journey, which my wife was reading aloud while I took time kicks and mileage measurements and discovered some interesting things. Remember, The Interrupted Journey is the book written by John Fuller that first told the story of the Hill's journey and

their sessions with Dr Benjamin Simon. Just south of Lancaster, when you cross up on the shoulder of Mount Prospect Corrigan Hill, that's the first spot that Betty and Barney saw their UFO. They're flying saucer. And when you cross the crest of Mount Prospect, same exact spot, that's the first place that you can see the warning light on the top of Camon Mountain. Immediately after seeing the UFO, it began to move rapidly straight up. It was like a shooting star, only it fell up, I think is

the quote. Immediately after you cross the shoulder of Mountain Prospect, US three goes down a nine grade for the next half mile, pointed directly at Cannon Mountain, and that aircraft warning light apparently moves straight up. Well, that flying saucer, Betting and Barney's disappeared on one side of the road, reappeared on the other. It was sometimes high, sometimes low,

just like that aircraft warning light. They're flying saucer got larger, brighter and closer the farther south they went, and so does the aircraft warning line gets larger, brighter and closer. I said to myself, my golly, I think I'm seeing their UFO right now. Actually I had already said that because I've made the connection. I've made the connection years before, but now I was testing out for sure. And we get to the sighting that really clinches everything. Bet and

Barney are the foot of Cannon Mountain. They're looking up the top of Cannon Mountain and they're seeing the lights at the tramway station. There is a aerial tramway, the first one in America started, goes up the side of the mountain. At the upper tramway house, there is a snack bar and there's lights you can see from the road. Betty and Barney reported seeing those lights of the snack bar, and they reported seeing the their UFO. They're flying saucer

at the same time. As you stand at the foot of Cannon Mountain on the side of the Root three, looking up at the top of the mountain, you see the lights at the top of the tramway and you see the aircraft warning light so Betty and Barney they're looking at the aircraft warning light, their point at the aircraft warning light, and they're saying, that's it. That's the flying saucer. I mean case closed right there. Strange arrivals

will return in a moment. This illusion of the lights on top of Cannon Mountain moving when in fact it is the car that is moving, is made further convincing by an effect called motion parallax Mark Ken from the

University of New Hampshire. Other things that night include seeing the light which other people have said that is simply a the beacon from a ski resort, and the fact that it seemed to follow them is absolutely perfectly in line with a depth cue called motion parallax, where you see things closer they are, the faster they moved, the

further away they are, the slower they move. This was at a distance away, so it appeared to kind of follow their car, but it was at not the distance away that the stars were, so it was moving differently from the stars, so it could look really weird if you don't know what you're looking at. Route three runs about two and eighty miles from the Canadian border in

New Hampshire, south to Boston. The main events of the hill siding took place over a distance of about a dozen miles from the Mount Cleveland Scenic Area to somewhere around the Indian Head Resort. This stretch takes you from just north of Franconia Notch through the notch itself, with mountains on either side, including Cannon Mountain and The Old Man in the Mountain on the right, and Mount Lafayette

on the left. After about seven miles in the notch, Route three exits into the lower hills, including the area around Indian Head. On a November afternoon, I drove this route that Betty and Barney took. It struck me that so much has changed since. Once you enter Franconia Notch, it's hard to feel like you are really recreate aiding

their journey with any sort of precision. The path Route three takes follows the same course north of the notch at the Mount Cleveland picnic area and south of the Notch around Indian Head, but the section that goes through the notch itself has been merged with the newer Root ninety three and takes a slightly different course. The Old

Man in the Mountain has also changed. It was a naturally formed rock outcropping that, when viewed at the right angle, as it was by thousands and thousands of tourists every year, looked like the craggy profile of an old man. It's gone now collapsing on May third, two thousand and three, but it was there in and the Hills reportedly used that profile to estimate the size of the UFO. So they entered Franconian Notch, driving south, with Cannon Mountain on

their right. Most skeptics agree that at this point, even if she had previously been seeing Jupiter, Betty is looking at the lights on the summit of Cannon Mountain. Barney is driving. Once they are in the notch, they stop at some point near the Old Man in the mountain. They get out of the car to look at the UFO. It is now close enough to be recognizable as a craft of some sort, not just a light. They stopped again at the base of the Old Man of the mountain.

They got out and they looked up at this thing again through binoculars. As they're watching it, it appeared to be lighted on only one side, and it appeared to be rotating. It's here that the story becomes more incredible. A planet or a summit light are no longer adequate explanations. My name is Travis Roy. I run Grand State Skeptics. I spent about a year researching the Betting and Barney Hill abduction and going to the archives at U n H to look through all the original documentation, and in

my day job, i am a I T guy. Travis realized that the moment at which the Hills UFO became more than a light is the same time that they were near the Cannon Mountain Tramway. The Old Man in the Mountain Historic site is right where Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway is. Then you have Cannon Mountain to the southwest of that, and then it's about six and a half miles to get to Indian Head Resort. So if you're talking three miles up from Indian Head, you can see

the top of Cannon Mountain. It's not until you get within like a mile or two of Indian Head that you can't see it. So if they saw something at the Old Man of the Mountain site, and then on the way towards Indian Head, they pulled over and looked through binoculars and saw something. It seems totally plausible to me that they would have saw the Cannon Mountain Tramway and then they the next thing they saw driving down the road would have been Indian Head Resort, which makes sense.

That's how I would explain it too, if it happened to me and the Hills description of the UFO seems similar to the appearance of the tram car that was used in the early nineteen sixties. If you look at the picture of the craft, it looks kind of like the old tramway, not the current one, but the one that existed at the time. It's much more boxy than your typical UFO that you think of as a flying saucer,

and it had things protruding from the sides. But I mean that could be the way the lights are, or it could have been reflections on something. It could have been anything, but the actual craft piece of it, where it has the body of the craft and the windows and the figures inside, looks very similar to what the Cannon Tramway looked like at the time. The Cannon Mountain Tramway was built in It was the first aerial passenger

tramway in North America. The base station for the tramway is just a few hundred yards from the Old Man in the Mountain parking lot. There's now a gift store where the viewing area once was. One skeptical theory is that Betty and Barney expected to see a UFO, saw the tram car and were confused. On the face of it, it's not such a far fetched idea. One of the hard things about trying to recreate what happened during that brief time is that it is not clear where they

stopped after the Mount Cleveland Scenic Area. They could have pulled over at any point around the Old Man in the mountain. If they were north of the tramway, It's entirely possible that the tram car passed in front of their view of the Old Man. There aren't many visual cues there to determine distance. In the darkness, especially when looking through binoculars, the tram car would have seemed bigger compared to the Old Man because it would have been

much closer to where Betty and Barney had stopped. The problem is that there's no evidence that the tram was running at that late hour. It was well after the last scheduled tourist run. The restaurant at the top of Cannon Mountain was closing around that time, so maybe it was being used to bring down staff or something like that, but there's no record of it from the old man in the mountain. They continued south for a few miles, briefly stopping at times, and eventually encountering the craft in

the field near Indian Head. This is where Barney saw the figures in the craft looking back at him. He took his binoculars, helped him up to his eyes and looked up at this object. He could see a lighted row of windows that seemed to be around the front part of this craft. Gazing back at him were between eight and eleven figures inside the craft. The skeptical explanation begins with Betty and Barney's fatigue and stress. They've been on the road for hours. Betty in particular, thinks they

are being followed by a UFO. Her nervousness is affecting Barney because they are not thinking clearly, they misconstrue whatever they see near Indian Head. With this in mind, Travis Roy speculates about what they might have seen. I've done that drive and you can't see Cannon Mountain from the Indian Head Resort. You can see it from a small drive north. The distance isn't that much, And that goes back to what I said about how it's really hard to tell exactly where you are. The other thing, too,

is is that and they're retelling of it. They pulled over at one point at Indian Head and Barney went across the street and looked at the craft through binoculars. Now, if they were doing that, I mean Indian Head Resort was there during that time, there would have been other people around there. I mean, even in the middle of the night, there's still like the hotel staff and stuff, and there would have been lights on and everything else.

So I really don't think that that's where they stopped to look at the craft, because if they saw that, wouldn't you have gone into the hotel for help or like, I'm seeing this crazy thing. I think that it happened north of Indian Head before they got there, and they just say at it's Indian Head because that was the next landmark that they hit. There is a problem with this explanation. Betty actually describes passing the Indian Head Resort before they have the encounter in the field because they

are traveling from north to south. If you are sure that Betty is right about the sequence of events, this doesn't fit Travis's timeline. Jim McDonald has an alternate explanation for this part of the story, which is consistent with Betty's sequence of events. He believes that the encounter in the field happened in Woodstock, about eight miles south of the Indian Head Resort. They continue on south and here

comes the really horrible part of this. They get down to Woodstock where you find the jack O lanterns, which back in the early sixties had a large inflatable, glowing red or orange spherical jack lantern up on the roof of the motel, and this got inflated in their minds with the glowing red orange moon with the white aircraft warning light on the top of Cannon Mountain, and it is my belief that this is the point where they leaped out of their cars were running around the field,

and that later under hypnotic regression, became the abduction site. Later on, months later, when they were trying to find the place where they were abducted, they didn't find it, and they decided it must have been near Indian Heads somewhere, because it had to have been south of Franconian Notch. But it's notoriously difficult to find again during daylight someplace that you've only seen at night and memory is weird. Could this be the place? Yes, this was the place.

It is the place, and it became fixed. Robert Shaffer doesn't even point to any particular physical object for him, their exhaustion and excitement are explanation enough. Once they finally reached the state where they were both very excited and frightened when they got to this area called the Indian Head, which is like a profile on them, a mountain like

the Old Man of the Mountain used to be. I'm not sure what they were seeing at certain times there, but yeah, they neither one of them was any longer in a rational state of mind at that point. Fatigue and fear do a lot of heavy lifting in these explanations. Without these two factors, they aren't very convincing. If you are predisposed to think that the Hills were abducted, you probably don't buy them. But it's important to keep in mind that even if you don't accept any of these explanations.

The default is not an alien spaceship. In fact, the burden of proof is with the proponents of the Hills story. Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. What we have is a great story, but little in the way of convincing proof that had happened. This applies to the physical evidence that Betty and Barney had at the end of their trip. Remember how Kathleen Martin described Betty's torn

dress and Barney's scuff shoes. According to the abduction story, these happened when the Hills were being brought through the woods to the spacecraft. Is there another explanation? So what else do we have. We've got Betty's dress, which was torn. I have no idea how she tore her dress. There's lots of ways to tear a dress, particularly leaping in and out of a car in Fields and New Hampshire

in the middle of the night. The dress developed a white powder on it some years later, which exactly resembles mold, and barney shoes were scuffed, easy enough to do with a stick shift car, gas pedal, brake, pedal and clutch, and while leaping in and out of a car in open Fields, New Hampshire, in the middle of the night. Jim McDonald did not mention the broken binocular strap, but

presumably the same explanation would apply. The strap gets snagged on the door, perhaps as Barney jumps out of the car, which leaves the most compelling and most frustrating piece of physical evidence, the shiny spots on the trunk of their car. Remember Betty took a compass out to the car and when she placed it on the round shiny spots, the needle spun. There does not appear to have been any further investigation. This is Betty and Barney on the David

Schumberg Show. We discussed the spots with Ball to Live and with Mr Harman and Mr Jackson, But we have spent ours discussing this, and then it was just over on the at leaving when I left us. We just took out to show them to exam into Mr Webb, maybe John who was Yes, I did, and Walder Webb simply throws up his hand and discussed his own failure as an investigator. I am convinced in my own own line and nothing was hidden and it was simply a

very serious oversight. And he agrees that it was Ed Dalson of World Journal Tribune O those spots still there, and if not were what happened to them? The spots gradually wore away over the winter months, and we don't have the can they have. Dr Benjamin Simon, who conducted the hypnosis sessions with the Hell's was confounded by this failure to examine the spots. Can't be one of the

greatest mistakes I have ever seen. That is that the vir was assignedists and there was the story of the silver spots outside of Silvergonald in the back of their car, which they said at the time, Uh, we're still on the car, and God don't what reasons he never went out to look at It was an opportoint you to see one single objective thing, you know, we've never had a single objective thing. In the end, what might have been the most intriguing piece of evidence to emerge from

this whole encounter was left unexamined. It seems incredible that this trunk, which could have been the critical proof of an alien encounter, was ignored and left to the elements. But that's what happened. So what we are left with our questions about time to begin with both Betty's and Barney's watches stopped working that night and never worked again. More importantly, none of what we've heard accounts for their arriving home two hours later than they had expected. What

about the missing time 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 Rickike. Barney

Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to the Miln Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y Am 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 Mile dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio Physic, the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,