Regressed

five nine or five ten at the most. Number three? Did they speak English? Not in an actual speaking type voice? It was something like thought transferred? Number one? What physical symptoms did you later? Notice? What's what's is tom? Number one? Where you were alert when you were in the ship and awake? Uh? More like in a sim nabilistic states. Number two when they examined you, did they stick needles in you? Not needles? Needle? Remember when did they stick

a needle in Betty too? Yes, they stuck a needle in Betty? Were they like our needles? Number one? I didn't say the needle? Were they the same build as us? I mean, you know, how did they like have pointy heads or something. No, they had large cranium and the chin was very small, wouldn't you know it? That's all the time we had, which we did have more fascinating story. So mark a ballace, if you will please, without any consultation, and of course without changing once you have marked Tom.

For whom did you vote? I voted for number one, but I couldn't tell anything from the stories that they each told. But he looked like the kind of man who would have binoculars handy in his car, Beggy Cat. I voted for number one because they had big kids in me seating chins and wouldn't you know it's arsen I think that there's two great liars up there. And I had no way of judging except that the whole

thing took place around New England. And when I asked Number one about the warts, he said watch they had watched. And I'm from New England too, and I noticed watches, watches, watch votes are all in mind's made up, as you heard, and all let's find out which one of these three

gentlemen in truth is Barney Hill. Well, the real Barney Hill, please stand up on this episode of To Tell the Truth, the panelists were able to identify number one as the real Barney Hill, and both here and elsewhere, he was telling the truth as he saw it, but some of this truth involved memories that were revealed during his hypnosis sessions with Dr Benjamin Simon. This brings up an important question in evaluating the Hills experience. How much can you

rely on memories recovered through hypnotic regression? Simply put, is hypnosis a reliable tool for bringing back memories? I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals Episode five regressed Betty and Barney underwent their hypnosis treatment with Dr Benjamin Simon. We now have a much better understanding of how hypnosis works. Hosted the Skeptic Podcast Bryan Dunning. So this is actually what originally got me into this because I was working on another subject at the time, which was the whole

topic of hypnotic regression in general. And these recovered memories and the Betty Varney Hill story is kind of a classic example of what we think of as these recovered memories under hypnosis. It's now no longer the nineteen sixties, it's now the two thousand teens, and we now have very solid evidence that there is no such thing as hypnotic regression or recovered repressed memories. That's just simply not a part of psychology. That body of evidence is extraordinarily robust.

We see things like a court cases being overturned and stuff based on kind of the modern science of hypnosis and psychology. Hypnotic regression came to the public attention in the nine teen eighties and nineties. At this time, some psychiatric professionals were working with patients, often children, to quote unquote recover memories of sexual abuse. One outcome of this movement was a rash of claims that sexual abuse rituals

were being organized by groups of Satanists. The so called Satanic panic was eventually fully discredited and hypnotic regression along with it. Author freelance writer and skeptical investigator Robert Schaffer,

and this whole business about recovered memories. If you recall back in the late eighties and early nineties, it was a big thing to hypnotize people that allegedly repressed memories of sexual abuse, usually or some other trauma, but for the most party, it was sexual abuse, and it was there was just a huge controversy over this, so many people, you know, we're claiming to have recovered such memories, either

with or without hypnosis. And when somebody you know, claimed to recover this, they had, you know, there were support groups. It was a big thing. Innocent people got accused of terrible crimes based only on so called recovered memories, and the whole thing. Again, it's a very sad chapter. It's a very embarrassing chapter. Nobody in serious academia today takes any of this, you know, recovered memories as as anything

more than likely a fantasy. It's it's possible that maybe some of it might be true, or somebody remembers something, but again there's just no way to tell. I don't do hypnosis with people, but I have studied the literature on hypnotically refreshed memories. This is Elizabeth Loftis. I am a professor at the University of California the Irvine, the Irvine Campus. She's also one of the foremost experts on

human memory. One of the things that you can say about hypnosis it it might be helpful to somebody who wants to try to use it to lose weight or stop smoking or be less anxious, But when it comes to using hypnosis to try to to dig up allegedly buried trauma memories. That's when you've got to be really, really careful, because under the influence of hypnosis, especially if you're highly hypnotize herbal you are even more susceptible to

contamination and distortion. And then when you produce something in this hypnotic state, you have a tendency to believe, well, if I thought about it under hypnosis, it must have really happened to you become even more confident about it, whether it's true or not. Did you catch the part where Dr Loftis said that people who are easily hypnotized are also highly suggestible. In nineties sixty four, when Dr Simon conducted his sessions with the Hills, this connection was unknown.

In an undated document in the University of New Hampshire Special Archives titled Hypnosis Betty basically braggs about how hypnotizable she and Barney were. She writes at the end of the sessions, Dr Simon said that both of us were very good subjects who were able to reach a very

deep trance quickly and easily. The depth of our trances was unusual, a level where only one person out of millions might be able to reach the fact that both of us were able to do this was outstanding that we were two out of millions with the abilities to do this. Even if we allow for some hyperbole, we have it from Betty that Dr Simon considered them good subjects. We now know this would also make them highly suggestible. This is not to say that Dr Simon planted memories

during these hypnosi successions. He was an experienced and a highly respected psychiatrist, but it does raise the possibility that they weren't necessarily remembering actual events. Do you remember in the first episode we heard some audio from one of Barney's hypnos secessions. What struck me was how emotional Barney became when he described seeing the aliens looking at him from the windows of the UFO. I'm thinking my head away, God give all right, yes, God gotta get away. Oh oh, alright,

I'm getting way. Would someone under hypnosis react with such strong emotion to something that never actually happened? Just at an intuitive level, it seems as though a false memory wouldn't create that kind of dramatic fear response. Again, Elizabeth loftus one of the questions that researchers have wondered about is whether people would be emotional about false memories the

way they can sometimes be emotional about true memories. And the psychologist psychology professor Richard McNally has actually studied the emotional reactions of people who believe they were abducted by aliens. And what he has found and shown in a beautiful study is that when people are thinking about their abduction experiences, they are highly emotional. You measure their heart rate or

their their skin resistance or those physiological measures. They are as aroused and upset when they think about these experiences as other people are when they're thinking about truly traumatic experiences that have happened to them. And so mcnali concludes, and I would concur based on some work that I've done, that emotional reaction is certainly no guarantee of authenticity, that

people can be very emotional about false memories. Our current understanding of hypnosis and recovered memories is far more skeptical than it was in We know now that hypnosis is not a tool by which people can recall the exact details of past events. We also know that so called repressed memories are not reliable part of this has to do with how hypnosis works, but it also has to do with how memory itself is constructed and then retrieved. We like to say that memory doesn't work like a

recording device, like a video recorder. You don't just red or did and play it back. The process is much more complex and actually when we are remembering, we're essentially constructing or reconstructing the experience, and that means we are taking bits and pieces of information, sometimes acquired at different times and places, and bringing it together to construct what what feels like a memory, because that's what it feels like, right that you are remembering things as they actually happened,

But you aren't. Your memories are the product of a number of factors, which include the reality of what happened, but other things as well, memories of far more or I should say, remembering is a far more active process. This is Dr Mark Kenn, principal lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, among others. He's had a course on paranormal and other extraordinary beliefs. Every time you're telling that story, as you're saying, if you've told it a hundred times,

the hundredth time you're telling it. You're remembering the ninety nine time you told it. In the ninety time, you're remembering the time you told it. And so we have a several biases in there. We we have a bias that makes us more the focus of the story, so the things that happened to us are more prominent. We have a bias that puts the memories in line with what we believe about ourselves now. So even if we have changed tremendously since that time, that story is going

to fit who we are now. There's a number of other ones that stories tend to, as you say, streamline and fit a storyline better than the fragmented way that we might remember it initially. But there's a lot of time. I mean, people remember things that they can't possibly have remembered. They remember things that in fact did not happen. My brother remembered stories about being born. He didn't. He remembered

people telling him stories about that. Trying often we will, we will remember something as having happened to us when well, wait, no, we heard about that from somebody else. It's just that we imagined it so vividly that it became part of our own autobiographical memory. People will remember something happened, and in fact it was a TV show. The function of memory is to be able to have stuff that happened

at time one help us at time too. There's absolutely nothing about that that means it has to be accurate. And in fact, if biases are going to help us learn from the stuff that happened back then, to condense it, to make it simple so that we can react more quickly, then they're very useful, uh, to be able to say, oh, instead of there's all this this, this weirdness and random stuff that's happening back there, so I don't quite know how to make use of it. Nope, there's a story

in it. Boom, I can make use of it now. Strange arrivals will return in a moment. It's a difficult thing to contemplate that memories that seem so real, so vivid, are not necessarily what happened. There are mental recreations that change over time due to a number of factors, new perceptions about oneself, incorrect details that found their way into the last time you told the story, and the instinct to create a narrative out of the fragments from which

memories created. Memories can be vivid, but that does not equate to being accurate. And there's another thing. Memories can be influenced, altered, or even made up by external sources after the fact. That is, memory is not only fairly unreliable, but it is also easily corrupted. What we have shown is out there in the real world, well, we're exposed to misinformation. I don't know you could even say frequently.

We get misinformation when we talk to other people, or when we overhear other witnesses being interviewed, or what when we're asked a suggestive or leading questions by somebody who's interrogating us. When we are exupposed to media coverage about some event that we might have experienced. All of these provide an opportunity for new information to become available to a witness and to potentially produce a contamination of distortion in the witnesses memory. I asked Dr loftis how malleable

people's memories really are. One of the things that I and my collaborators have done is to expose people two events, maybe a simulated crime or accident, and then we feed them some misinformation about the event, and we look to see the extent at which they will accept this misinformation

and it will alter or transform their memory. And so we have found that you can show people an accident, for example, where a car goes to a yield sign, and you can feed the misinformation that it was a stop sign, and many people will claim that what they actually saw was the stop sign. They fall for the misinformation and it in essence becomes their memory. That's one type of study that we have done showing that it's pretty easy to change people's memories for the details of

events that they actually did experience. Details can be altered, I asked Dr loftis entirely new details could be created from suggestion? Can you lead someone to believe in something that wasn't there or didn't happen? You can add objects to memory. We've added objects to the memories of soldiers who were being interrogated. We made them believe they saw telephones or weapons in interrogation rooms when they didn't exist.

All through suggestive supplying of new information after some event is over keep this concept in mind that through suggestive supplying of new information, you can make people believe that they are remembering things that weren't there or didn't happen. I talked to al Jundra Rojas, the host of Open minds UFO Radio. He also writes about UFOs and the paranormal. You know my attempt, and luckily, I think making my

credits will agree I'm pretty good at it. Is that I try to take a journalistic approach, so I try to cover all sides and give all the facts available so people have more of an unbiased kind of overview of the phenomena or whatever it is that topic that I'm covering in this arena. Here he talks about Betty and Barney and the stories they told while under hypnosis. You know, these two individuals under hypnosis and by you know, I believe a credible hypnotist who wasn't really you know,

trying to guide them. They had very similar stories, even though they were regressed separately. I think that's the most compelling piece as far as evidence goes. This is the other mystery about the Hills hypnosis sessions. If you are a skeptic, how do you account for Betty and Barney separately telling essentially the same story. Dr Simon went so far as to have them forget what they disclosed so they could not talk to each other about them between

the weekly sessions. So we put, if the abduction didn't happen, how could their memories of it be so similar. This is Robert Schaeffer, followed by Brian Dunning. The whole idea of you know, this alien contact and being stopped and so on, that idea was not there originally. That's in the hypnosis part of the story. What happened was they met with the number, talked with a number of upologists. They loved to tell the story. Betty loved to tell the story to people who wanted to listen to her

about what she saw. And at that point it was a UFO sighting. It wasn't an abduction or or or an alien encounter. And it was only after then she started to have these dreams in her dream she was abducted. She did meet up with aliens, and she told her dreams to people, and then somebody suggested, well, maybe it

wasn't a dream, maybe it really happened. And so then when later when they went to doctor Simon, and really the reason that both of them went to see Dr Simon was they were having especially Barney was was very nervous. He was having trouble sleeping, he was having ulcers. Frankly, he was in quite a state, and so then Dr

Simon hypnotized both of them. I think the most significant point about it is that this hypnotic regression didn't happen for almost two and a half years after the supposed event, and a lot of people don't realize that. A lot of people think, oh, they went in the next day and had their hypnosis and told the same story in these separate rooms where they hadn't had time to corroborate and get their stories straight. That's not the case at all.

So for more than two years, Betty had been writing down this version of her story in tremendous detail, writing and rewriting and editing it, telling it to Barney over and over and over again. Is it any surprised that their stories were similar once they went under hypnosis. Once you get to that part of it and you see, oh my gosh, there goes the whole hypnos just part of the story. Just there's nothing interesting or surprising about it at all. Anymore, the question becomes did Betty tell

Barney about her dreams? If so, this would explain why their stories were essentially two perspectives on the same narrative. This came up during the March hypnosis session when Dr Simon questioned Barney about the basis for his tale of alien abduction. This is from the transcript of that session as read by actors. Somebody told you about this before that in some way? Who was that? Betty? My wife? Yeah?

And how did she tell you about it? She would say that she had a dream, and that a dream was that she had been taken aboard a UFO, and that I was also in a dream, I was taken a boat. Yeah, but you told me that she didn't speak to you about this. How did she tell you this? She would tell me this from usually when someone would ask us about our sighting of a UFO, and then she would mention this, and I just told her it was a dream and nothing to get alarmed about. Did

she tell you all of the details? Can you tell me all of the details of what happened to her? She would tell me a great many of the details of her dreams, but she was not certain to the location where we had stopped. And she would tell me she had gone into this UFO and had talked with the people there on board and she was told she would forget in her dreams, she would forget about this, and she said she would tell me that she was determined that she would not forget. That she told these

people in this UFO that she would not forget. And this is the way she would tell me of her dreams. And I told her they were only dreams, and that I can't believe whatever these dreams are that she is having, only that she is having nightmares if they are frightening, and she said, no, they are not frightening. It's just that she feels that somehow there is some connection between

her dreams, because she never dreamed of UFOs before. And she would tell me that they had stuck something in her navel, causing great pain, and that just the wave of the hand, this pain disappeared. And she was not telling this to me, but I would be present while she was telling it to friends of ours, or to Walter Webb. Whenever we would see him, he would ask us about the UFO sighting that we had had. In then I would hear of dreams. But never did she

tell this actually to me. Dr Simon himself endorsed the theory that Barney had been influenced by Betty's dreams, and that those dreams were the basis for both of their quote unquote memories recovered through hypnosis. And in October letter to the prominent UFO researcher Philip Class, Dr Simon writes the UFO was a citing the abduction did not take place, but was a reproduction of Betty's dream which occurred right after the sighting. This was her expression of anxiety. Is

contrasted to Barney's more psychosomatic one. Of course, Dr Simon's opinion is just that an opinion. It is an evidence, and just as our understanding of memory and hypnosis has changed, the concept of alien abduction was unknown at the time. UFO researcher and physicist Stanton Friedman believes that it was the unprecedented nature of the Hills experience that led Dr Simon to discount it. There's no question that Dr Simon was skeptical of the notion of alien visitors. Everybody was.

You know, we're talking in the sixties, long before we had gone in the moon, long before we operated nuclear rocket engines, for example. On the ground, there wasn't a body of data which would lead most people to think that this kind of thing could happen. That may be true, but what we know about regression hypnosis makes Benny and

Barney's abduction seem unlikely. Absent other evidence, the hypnotically recalled stories really don't prove anything, and we've already seen how the alien symbols and the star map have at best questionable value as proof. We'll talk about the physical evidence torn dress, scuff shoes, and so on in a later episode. Even in Dr Simon realized that they might very well be talking about Betty dreams and not a real event. Where did the line blur between reality and nightmare? 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 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 blue Book. Learn more about the show over at grimm and mil dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.