Zeta Reticuli

me a good natured hard time about my skepticism. I know his passing is a loss to the UFO community, and I feel fortunate to have had the chance to chat with him. October Margine. My qualification to do this research, I've had one course of an astronomy in college about twenty years ago, which doesn't amount too much except it did show me to their placement and quite an interest in that since childhood. But my main interest is in biology and anthropology. My degree was in sociology. I went

back from my teaching credits later. I also had what amounted to the pre med course with a great interest in biology. Being passion is anthropology makes um euphorology so interesting, and you can consider how many different kinds of cultures there might be, and add to this a different biological background which would lead into even more complex and far reaching cultural differences. Aspects are highly intriguing, to say the least. Betty Hill recalled being shown two objects while she was

on the spacecraft. The first was a type of book containing alien symbols. We looked at this in the previous episode. The second object was more compelling and it prompted exhaustive research. Proponents of the Hill story point to it is evidence that they were in fact abducted by aliens. This object came to be called the star map. I'm tolbee ball. This is Strange Arrivals Episode four, Zeta Reticuli. Betty and

Barney Hill reacted very differently during their abduction experience. Barney spent much of the time in a day's responsive to Betty's please. His hypnotic recall suggested that he regarded the experience as something to be endured, and he kept his eyes firmly shut from much of the ordeal. Betty, on the other hand, told of being energized and engaged. In particular, she carried on a conversation with one of the aliens, whom she called the leader. She says, she asked the

leader to things. One was for a souvenir. The leader gave her the book with the alien symbols and then, to her frustration, took it back again. The second thing she asked was where are you from. Here's Betty from her hypnosis session on March fourteenth land across the room. Did the head of the table, and there was he did something. It wasn't like a draw, he said, I did something in the metal of the wall. There was

an opening and he pulled down a map. Man He asked me, had I ever seen a map like this before? And I watched across the room and I leaned against the table and I looked at it. It was an oblong nap and he said that the heavy lines were trade routes, and then the other lines the other that the solid lines were place as they went Occasionally, he said that it's a broken lines were expeditions. Betty asked

the leader to point out where he was from. He responded by asking if she knew where the Earth would be on the map. Betty said that she didn't. The leader said that if that was the case, showing her his home star on the map, wouldn't mean anything to her, and he put it away. And this at first was the whole story of the star map, as we're called under hypnosis by Betty. Barney was not in the room

at the time and did not mention it. Dr Benjamin Simon, the psychiatrist who conducted the hypnosis sessions with the Hills, seems to have been intrigued by mention of the star map Betty Hill from presentation. Dr Simon gave me a post autumatic suggestion. He said, if I wanted to, I could sketch the start map, but if I didn't want it, I didn't have to. So about two weeks later I sketched it. You can easily find images of her sketch on the Internet. It was drawn on a single piece

of paper. Twenty one circles and dots representing stars are spread across the page, some connected with lines and others just by themselves. I wouldn't call the resulting map crude exactly. Maybe casual is a better word. Think about what you would draw if someone asked you for a map showing how to get from the nearest highway to your house. You'd probably get all the roads and turns right but with the length of the roads be perfectly to scale.

Betty's star map seems like a galactic equivalent of that kind of map, but that's not how everyone perceived it. A school teacher from Ohio named Marjorie Fish saw the star map and thought it might reveal where the aliens came from. She decided to try to figure out the vantage point in our galaxy from which the map was made. Working in the nineties, sixties and seventies, Marjorie didn't have access to a computer to pursue her research. Her efforts

were decidedly analog, and they were extraordinary. In her living room, she created a series of three dimensional models of the nearby galaxy using beads hung from the ceiling by string. Here's Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and uphologist. He was a leading researcher into the Hills story for fifty years and knew both Betty and Barney and an A brilliant woman named Marjorie Fish did something nobody else had ever done. She about three dimensional models of our local galactic neighborhood.

Incredibly detailed work. I mean, her biggest model had two hundred and fifty six stars in it. That means you've got to have the location of the star before you can build them model little beats hung on strings. That is tedious work and now hard part at that time, because it's hard to measure distances. It's easy to measure angles. You know, we're in this sky to look. That's a two dimensional problem. But how far away is it? Ah, we had lousy data. She got the best data available.

She wound up building a total of more than twenty three dimensional models and was able to find one and only one pattern that matched what Betty had drawn. Angle for angle, line length for line length. The Milne Special Collections and Archive at the University of New Hampshire's Diamond Library as a number of photographs of Marjorie Fish's models. She either used cloth or paper to create a black background. A huge number of beads are suspended in air by

strings attached to the ceiling. They look like super thin icicles. Marjorie would examine the model from different spots and angles, trying to find one that match Betty's star map. It was exacting work. To get a sense of how detailed her efforts were, we can listen to a recording she made in late nineteen nine. During her work on her models, she engaged in a correspondence with a scientist named Richard Lee. In response to letters that he apparently wrote her with

questions about her methods. She sent audio tapes. Most of the conversation is technical and sounds like this. Right now, I'm in the process of going through the metric parallax catalog and pulling out all these stars in the parallax of point zero four nine two point zero three. Oh, this would take all the stars from sixty five light years out to a hundred light years to supplement the fleecy catalog so that a model can be constructed of

these stars. Now, this is one of my listing of stars of good have plants with life, so I'm not going to be including the stars brighter than F five. And the work was frustrating too, because she was unable to find a match in her model for Betty's map. But then a scientific discovery suddenly unlocked the maps puzzle and in the process seemed to suggest that it might truly have an extraterrestrial origin. Strange arrivals will return in

a moment. Marjorie Fish went to incredible lengths building complex models to try to identify the vantage point of the star map. Her efforts went unrewarded until new astronomical data became available and she updated her model. Kathleen Martin, Betty's niece, and a UFO researcher. This one was after three additional stars were discovered by astronomers and she added them to the map, and she changed the distance data on some of the others, and then in two she had a match.

To be clear, what Kathleen is saying is that Marjorie Fish was able to find a model that fit the star map until three previously undiscovered stars were identified. Once she added them to her model, she had a match. The inference here is that there is only one way Betty could have drawn the map with those stars. That is, if the map that she saw that night had information not known to scientists at the time. Could this be

proof that the map was not of earthly origin. The next step was to have her work vetted for accuracy and to be verified by the scientific community. Here's Marjorie again from her audio correspondence. I had assumed that everyone in the field wanted to know where they came from. I put in cross references and extra datus, so it could be a pot chect in the matter of an hour or two and thoroughly check in our two days. Point by point the model could be built and checked

inside of a week. Everything I've done can be checked. Since I've worked out all the methods, these could be out and redone for are easier in the first time of attack had to be lopped out. This is when Stanton Friedman was called in as a nuclear physicist, and this was his interest in the case. He was able

to find astrophysicists to vet Marjorie's work. It also ended up being done as a computer generated analysis at Ohio State University, and what they discovered is that the two primary stars in the foreground were as they to reticulate, one and two that are about thirty nine and a half light years away, because one further away than the other, but they were only about a light year apart, which

was fairly close. There were binary stars, but they could possibly maintain a stable war but so theoretically planets would be able to evolve around those stars, just like we have with our son in our solar system. Now that the stars had apparently been identified, more research could be done on the map. Betty thought that she might be able to use it to identify a purpose for the alien journeys. What we know about the universe is still

all in a theory. We still don't know. You know a lot of the speculation, but the speculation is that there are party seven nearby stads that our astronomers believe have a son, and planets and conditions very similar to us. I could have advanced life now. I had sixteen of those Friday seven stars on my map out of an area of about two hundred studs in the sky. Uh the broken law well willing to staff systems which are younger than we are. Um, the heavy lines are going

to send systems our age older. So it's looking it looks as though they're going out into the nearby staff systems, looking them all, finding out the stage of advancement of life, and if we're advanced enough, they come back and take another look. If we're not, if they going to younger planets and they're not advanced, they go out on an expedition and then I'll go back others. Stanton Freedman in particular sought to support the star map with scientific credibility.

As we'll see that effort was met with significant pushback. I published her work in an article in UFO magazine. I guess it was something like that. And then I convinced Terry Dickinson, who was editor of Astronomy magazine. I had met Jerry had attended one of my lectors, and I told him about Marjorie's work and suggested he to an article about it. Well, he talked to a whole bunch of people. He wasn't gonna accept what I said.

I mean, that was interesting, and and he looked at what I had published, and then he wrote an article. He talked to Cross SAG and he talked to a whole bunch of people. It got more response than anything they'd ever published. And he carried letters over the next year and finally put out at thirty two page full color booklet, The Zeta Reticuli Incident, and sold ten thousand

copies right off the bat, which was incredible. And then Carl Sagan's attorney complained because Carl's name was on the cover with five other contributors I think it was five something like then, and threatened to sue him. Terry Dickinson, the editor of the Fledgling Astronomy Magazine, it had only been in existence for a year and a half, was clearly intrigued by the Hill's tail, and found the evidence on balance to be inconclusive. His article ends with the sentence,

the only answer is to continue the search. Someday, perhaps soon, we will know. This set off nearly a year's worth of argument in Astronomy Magazine's letter section. This level of interest led to the publication of the special edition titled the Zeta Reticuli Incident. It contained Dickinson's original article and then a series of letters and responses from scientists and other experts. Carl Sagan was the host of the phenomenally popular nine eighties television show Cosmos. He was perhaps the

most famous scientist in America. Marjorie felt that it would be important to bring the star map to his attention against the private him as the oddly enough, he's prejudice against youthos. This may work our favor if he's reasonably fair, although I've heard he may not be if I can get him interested enough or mad enough to try to find flaws in the data, and he can't. He says so his word as a respected scientist and as an

a opponent to uthos will carry more weight. I found a two falls in his work, and that just might get him mad enough to want to find some in mine. She got Siggin's attention all right. He sent letters to Astronomy strongly taking issue with the star maps authenticity. When the special edition was published, he threatened to sue Astronomy Magazine because he had not given permission for his letters to be reprinted. The issue was pulled from the shelves.

The entire data reticulous incident seems to be something of a fondly remembered embarrassment to Astronomy Magazine. In the online version of the original article, current editor David Ker writes two things happened from this absurd tale. First, it sold lots of books. Second, it nearly ruined the reputation of this young Astronomy magazine. He also says it may have

caused Dickins in his job, as he was fired months later. Sagan, however, was not finished with his public criticism of the star map. His show Cosmos mostly focused on explaining space physics to a general audience, but in episode twelve Encyclopedia Galactica, he focused on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In this episode, there's a brief segment about Betty and Barney Hill. He said, don't believe, Oh I don't. There must be a reasonable explanation.

The episode begins with the bizarre dramatization of the Hills UFO encounter. Betty and Barney are depicted driving in the rain and then lurching around in a stupor. It wasn't raining the night of the Hills encounter. Of course, the scene seems calculated to make them look as silly as possible. After this unpromising start, the episode cuts to Carl Sagan, looking dapper in a tan jacket and blue shirt. He

walks along the side of a grassy hill. He's carrying a path of some sort that turns out to have a simplified version of Betty's star map. This seems to be the real reason for bringing up the Hills. He goes through a sequence of comparisons between betty star map and a map of the stars from Marjorie Fish's model. The first comparison is between the two maps with the lines indicating trade routes drawn in. Sagan says they look similar, but mostly because of the lines. He then shows the

Fish map with a different set of lines strawn. Now, as you'd expect, the maps suddenly look very different. But he doesn't stop there. The real test, he says, is to take a look at the maps without any lines drawn in to connect the stars and compare them that way. When he shows these two maps, they don't look much alike at all. Looking at this last pair of maps, he concludes, as read by a voice actor, and then there's very little resemblance left. But these particular stars are

selected from a large catalog of star positions. Our vantage point in space is also selected to make the best possible fit with the Hill map. If you can pick and choose from a large number of stars viewed from any advantage point in space you want, you can always find something resembling the pattern you're looking for. I'm surprised that nobody could find a better fit to the Hill map. Not surprisingly, proponents of the Hill story were not amused.

In response to this episode, Stanton Friedman wrote a furious letter to the senior vice president of kse CET, the public broadcasting system station that produced Cosmos. In it, he strongly objects to the portrayal of the Hill encounter and the segment on the star map. He says it is part of a clear attempt to set science up on one side and believers UFO enthusiasts on the side of religion and superstition and obviously not scientific. Freedmen clearly objects

to Sagan's tone regarding quote unquote UFO enthusiasts. But the real question here is whether the map that Betty drew on a sheet of paper based on her hypnotically regressed memory provides an accurate tool to identify a distinct group

of stars. I'd be willing about that if you took a handful of sunflowers so he's dropped them on a piece of paper and mark their locations, that you would be able to find someplace in the universe that matched that pattern at some rain chet some orientation, at some scale. This is author Jim McDonald. I'd also be willing to bet that the the Hill map matches somewhere else in the universe as well, or better that it matches uh

the setter reticulised site. I will also bet that that same map matches the pattern of some group of towns, cities, or villages somewhere in the world. At some orientation, at some range, at some scale, or that it matches the patterns, and somebody of water islands at some body of water at some range, at some scale, at some orientation, unless and until we get to set articular and find little gray aliens. Uh, it's nothing. It's dots on a piece of paper, which you or I could make dots on

a piece of paper. But it is not just the process of matching Betty's map to an actual part of the galaxy that causes problems. How how accurate could the map possibly be? Think about how difficult it would be to precisely place a series of dots and lines on a piece of paper based on something you've seen two

years ago, Hosts of the Skeptoid podcast, Ryan Dunning. The claim associated with this map is that she saw this on a wall in the spaceship and then two and a half years later, remembered what it looked like, and during the hypnosis session drew this out, drew these dots on a piece of paper, and based on that, we're supposed to believe that this is an absolutely accurate, you know, to the micron depiction of stars in our local galaxy.

Here somewhere that's an awfully weak point right there. When you look at a map showing a dozen dots that are in a random more or less a random distribution, are you going to be able to reproduce the positions of each one of those exactly more than two years later? That strange credib pility right there. There's no reason to think her memory of that star map would be remotely accurate, let alone accurate at all. I mean, the brain simply

doesn't work that way. Our brains are not digital recorders. Our brains are abstraction engines. When you look at a map that shows a dozen dots, the only thing your brain stores is that there were a dozen dots randomly distributed on that paper, and that's the best you can do when you try to reproduce it later. There's no reason to think that this map could have been an

accurate representation of something she'd seen two years before. Carl Sagan and Jim McDonald may have been right that you can find matches for any random array of stars if you search enough, But with what we know now, that seems almost beside the point, Because it is nearly impossible to believe that Betty could sketch a replica of the star map with the incredible degree of accuracy needed to

identify Zata Reticuli as the alien's point of origin. This doesn't prove that Betty wasn't shown a star map by the leader or aboard a spaceship, merely that the chances that she could produce an accurate replica are essentially zero. Late in life, when more accurate data about the characteristics and locations of stars in our galaxy became available, Marjorie Fish concluded that her identification of Zeta Reticuli was not accurate. This view was mentioned in the obituary that ran when

she died on April eight. Quote later, after newer data was compiled, she determined that the binary stars within the pattern were too close together to support life, so, as a true skeptic, she issued a statement that she now felt that the correlation was unlikely. Even if you concede that using the star map to locate the alien's point of origin is a dead end, it doesn't really prove the the Hill's abduction experience didn't happen. There's still this.

Betty and Barney were hypnotized separately and told similar mutually supporting stories, stories they hadn't remembered before their hypnosis sessions. How can you explain this if they hadn't actually been abducted during those missing hours? 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 MILM Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y Am in Norwich, connectic it, 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, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.