Episode 29: Barney and Betty Hill Sessions

The Betty and Barney Hill abduction is one of the most famous and widely publicized UFO encounters in history. On the night of September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from a vacation in Canada when they claimed to have experienced a close encounter with a UFO. According to their account, they observed a bright light in the sky that seemed to follow their car. Eventually, they stopped to get a better look, and Barney claimed to have seen humanoid figures through binoculars. After returning to their car and driving away, the Hills experienced a period of “missing time” – about two hours that they could not account for. They arrived home feeling disoriented and with physical evidence that something unusual had occurred: Betty’s dress was torn, Barney’s shoes were scuffed, and both their watches had stopped working. In the weeks following the incident, Betty began having vivid dreams about being taken aboard a spacecraft and subjected to medical examinations by extraterrestrial beings. The couple sought help from a psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, who used hypnosis to recover their memories of the event. Under hypnosis, both Betty and Barney described being taken aboard the UFO and subjected to various medical tests by beings with large eyes and gray skin. The Hills’ story was widely publicized and became the subject of the 1966 book “The Interrupted Journey” and the 1975 television movie "The UFO Incident". Their account has been both supported and criticized by various researchers, but it remains a cornerstone of UFO lore and has influenced many subsequent reports of alien abductions.