Barney Hill lived in New Hampshire with his wife Betty Hill.1 The couple were interracial, and both were active in the civil rights movement.2 They are best known for the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) abduction, a reported UFO sighting and period of missing time; most researchers in the alien abduction field regard it, together with the 1957 case of Antonio Villas-Boas, as one of the two watershed early abduction reports.3
On the night of 1961-09-19, the Hills were driving home to New Hampshire as part of the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill interrupted journey and UFO abduction September 19, returning from a holiday whose furthest point had been Montreal, Quebec, Canada.4 According to American Cosmic, they were on a rural road when they spotted a light resembling a falling star that moved differently;5 they stopped, used binoculars to try to identify it, then continued on their way.6 The light appeared to come toward the car, almost filling the windshield,7 and, frightened, they stopped again, whereupon Barney Hill got out with a pistol he was carrying.8 Barney Hill said that, using binoculars, he saw a large curved window on the object behind which humanoid figures appeared to be looking at him;9 he said he then became frightened, rushed back to the car, and drove away.10 The couple’s dog, Delphi, was frightened during the sighting.11 According to Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults, a few miles down the road they lost awareness of their actions and next found themselves driving past Ashland, about 100 kilometres to the south;12 Betty Hill said they became aware of a period of missing time and arrived home a couple of hours later than they had anticipated.13
Barney Hill’s anxiety symptoms began just after the sighting,14 and he also developed symptoms of high blood pressure;15 according to American Cosmic, he also experienced headaches and nightmares.16 The Hills did not report the creatures or the missing time until they discussed the case with a local UFO enthusiast they trusted.17 Barney Hill said that what they reported to the United States Air Force (USAF) - a disk with windows - fell into what he called “strangeness category 3”;18 according to Jacques Vallée, it was only when describing the experience to people they felt would not scoff, such as Donald Keyhoe and later their therapist, that the couple divulged the story of an encounter with nonhuman beings.19 The case first came to wider attention through a six-page report from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) describing the sighting;20 when NICAP later interviewed the couple, it accepted their account completely.21 Barney Hill had been under treatment for about a year with a New Hampshire psychiatrist for marked anxiety before being referred to Benjamin Simon.22
Simon kept an appointment his secretary had made with Barney Hill in December 1963.23 By January 1964 the couple’s anxiety dreams and stress-related problems had become severe enough that they sought the Boston psychiatrist’s ongoing care, in what became the Betty and Barney Hill’s 1964 hypnosis sessions with Benjamin Simon.24 The case may have been the first in which hypnosis was used on people claiming to have been abducted by aliens.25 In the Betty and Barney Hill hypnotherapy sessions with Benjamin Simon that followed, Simon used hypnosis to try to penetrate what appeared to be an amnesic period covering roughly a two-hour gap in the couple’s journey home;26 he hypnotised Barney Hill and Betty Hill one at a time, beginning with Barney Hill, directing each to relive and act out the trip rather than simply give a written account.27 Under hypnosis, Barney Hill’s story matched, without significant difference, both Betty Hill’s account and the story already written up by the NICAP investigator.28 The hypnosis revealed, mostly from Barney Hill’s unconscious, a marked anxiety about being a Black man in a white culture during the drive south;29 at one point he described a state of intense fear before the sighting in which he groveled on the ground and screamed with terror near woods where he feared bears might come out and harm him.30 Under hypnosis, Barney Hill did not show strong conviction that the object was anything other than a wayward plane,31 whereas Betty Hill showed much greater conviction that it had been a UFO.32 From the point of the sighting onward the two accounts diverged: Betty Hill’s story continued further than Barney Hill’s, with more detail and less evident terror.33 Simon found that the couple’s stories were alike up to the sighting, but that Betty Hill’s account of the abduction that followed was far more vivid and detailed, while Barney Hill simply felt himself being supported with his eyes closed, and nothing of Betty Hill’s abduction account appeared in his own.34 Benjamin Simon said that if the abduction had really happened, two people undergoing the same two-hour experience should give identical testimony, yet the abduction portions of the accounts, unlike everything preceding them, were markedly different.35 According to Simon, he never believed the Hills’ UFO abduction was real, and instead regarded their story as a fantasy to be explored in order to relieve their anxiety;36 he said he had concluded that the underlying stimuli were an American Airlines aircraft he had seen long before he knew the Hills, and a brilliantly lit sign outside Hartford, Connecticut, reflected through misty sky.37 Simon’s treatment of the couple was, by his own account, substantially successful within about seven months.38
Jacques Vallée, who has written on the case, has said he believes the Hills really saw a UFO, that something unknown stopped their car and took control of their minds, and that they were not lying or “nuts."39 He has also said he does not believe any contactees, including the Hills, have been physically aboard an actual saucer, but rather took a nonphysical trip controlled by a system acting on human consciousness, which the Soviets term “psychotronic."40 Vallée spent hours with the couple and discussed the case with Dr. Simon (psychiatrist in Barney and Betty Hill case).41 According to Messengers of Deception, ufologists including Stanton Friedman and David Saunders have taken Marjorie Fish’s star model to indicate that the craft came from the Zeta Reticuli (star system).42 Decades later, a team from the Anomaly Physical Evidence Group (APEG) led by Bill Chalker received dress samples and control biological samples relating to the Hills, as part of the Betty Hill’s 1961 dress Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) analysis;43 deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) recovered from Betty Hill’s dress was connected to the couple, and at least some of the stained areas were found to be due to spider’s blood.44
David Halperin has described the eyes in a sketch Barney Hill made under hypnosis as indefinably sinister and malevolent, with the irises and pupils not distinguished from each other and set close together, the rest of the eyes trailing away upward toward the sides of the being’s head.45 The sceptic and pop-culture historian Martin Kottmeyer noted that the “wraparound eyes” Barney Hill described had been seen by the US television audience on 1964-02-10, twelve days before Barney Hill’s hypnotic session, in an episode of the science-fiction series The Outer Limits.46 The alien in that episode, “The Bellero Shield,” had the same sort of wraparound eyes Barney Hill had described.47 According to American Cosmic, Barney Hill later told John Fuller that the being’s eyes continued around to the sides of its head, so that it appeared able to see several degrees beyond the lateral extent of human vision.48 The case was later invoked as a point of comparison for other reported encounters: the 1967-12-03 experience of Nebraska patrolman Herb Schirmer - the 1967 Herb Schirmer Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) abduction, Ashland Nebraska - was regarded as comparable to the abduction accounts of the Hills and of the 1973 Pascagoula, Mississippi Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) abduction.49 According to Chris Ramsay, the Greys (extraterrestrial beings) reported by Betty and Barney Hill differed from those described by fellow alleged abductee Erik Nanstiel, having different slit-like eyes.50 Barney Hill died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 46.51