UNH opens display of famous 'alien abduction'

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UNH opens display of famous 'alien abduction'
April 19, 2009
By DAVID BROOKS
Nashua Telegraph

No offense to Robert Frost, Alan Shepard or Grace "Peyton Place" Metalious, but to many people, the most intriguing folks ever to come from New Hampshire were Betty and Barney Hill.

Back in 1961, the Hills said they saw a UFO while driving back to Portsmouth from Canada through the White Mountains well after midnight. When they finally got home, they found they had "lost" two hours.

Later, dreams and hypnosis therapy led them to believe that during these hours, they had been taken to a spaceship and examined by a half-dozen aliens, who finally freed them and erased their memories, leaving mysterious spots on the trunk of their car and a powder of uncertain origin on Betty Hill's torn dress.

The Hills mostly kept this tale to themselves and some friends – their report to authorities at Pease Air Force Base was largely pooh-poohed – until a surprise report surfaced in the now-defunct Boston Traveler newspaper four years later, after which they achieved enormous fame as the first modern "alien abduction" victims.

Almost a half-century later, their tale of short, humanoid aliens in a silent circular spacecraft that mysteriously caused their 1957 Chevy to stop working and who inserted a long, needle-like probe into Betty Hill remains a classic, cited by anybody interested in the UFO field.

That's largely why the University of New Hampshire has added Betty Hill's huge selection of notes, letters, audio tapes and videos to its permanent collection in the university library.

"The Hill story has defined alien abductions – the grayish skin, the almond eyes. It has become totally a part of pop culture," said J. Dennis Robinson, editor of SeacoastNH.com and a historian, who interviewed Betty Hill several times before her death in 2004. Barney Hill died in 1969.

However, alien abduction isn't the only reason the Hills are interesting enough for the new collection and accompanying exhibit, or to draw two dozen people to the UNH library Friday for a forum announcing the project.

More important to some, the Hills were a big part of the region's civil-rights movement in the turbulent early '60s, partly because they were social activists and partly because of their own situation: Betty Hill, a local woman, was white, while Barney Hill, who had moved up from the South, was black.

In 1961, after all, their marriage was still illegal in 16 other states, and they often drew stares even in New Hampshire.

"We didn't talk about UFOs. We had other issues to deal with, big issues," said Valerie Cunningham, executive director of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail and a longtime Seacoast civil-rights activist, who knew the Hills well.

Barney Hill, who worked in the post office, served several roles with the local chapter of the NAACP and the grassroots group SCORR, giving talks, aiding investigations such as those of local barber shops that sometimes refused to cut his hair. He co-founded Rockingham Community Action, a leading nonprofit group.

Betty Hill, a social worker, provided support, as well, and the two even attended Lyndon Johnson's presidential inauguration.

The Hills' niece Kathleen Marden, of Stratham, said during Friday's forum that they had kept news of the abduction quiet for fear of ridicule, and of losing their jobs and their standing in the civil-rights community.

It isn't clear how the Boston Traveler got the story, she said, but once it was out, there was no stopping it. The collection includes a Look magazine from October 1965 in which "The incredible story of two people who believe they were 'kidnapped' by humanoids on a spacecraft" shares space on the cover with actress Elizabeth Taylor.

A book, "The Interrupted Journey" by John Fuller (who also wrote "Incident at Exeter" about another famous spaceship event in New Hampshire), made them superstars in the UFO community. There was even a movie about it, with James Earl Jones playing Barney Hill.

Barney Hill, it seems, was never comfortable with the publicity, but Betty Hill came to embrace it, particularly in later years.

She sketched a 3-D star system shown her by one alien that one researcher used to guess that the aliens came from the Zeta Reticuli star system; displayed sculptures of what the aliens looked like; and became so wrapped up with what Marden calls "credulous, not serious" people that she took to believing some airplanes were UFOs in disguise.

Marden, who remembers hearing the family talk about the events, has written her own book about it, called "Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience."

Marden was instrumental in getting the collection, which includes the dress Betty Hill wore on the night she said she was abducted, to UNH. She says her aunt, a graduate of the school, wanted it there for future study.

Marden describes herself now as a "ufologist," and said she believes that "something" happened that night of Sept. 19, 1961, partly because of what she says are otherwise inexplicable consistencies between the Hills' separate statements under hypnosis. She isn't sure exactly what it was, but she's certain it wasn't just their imagination.

Betty Hills' material is now part of the UNH Center for New England Culture, which also holds material such as a 19th-century edition of Chaucer's tales and a valuable collection of early jazz recordings.

The material isn't part of the school's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, home of much research and development for devices that head out of Earth's orbit, and nobody from UNH's space science departments was associated with the forum.

The public exhibit in the first floor of the library carefully avoids speculating about the truth of the Hills' tale.

"That's the nice thing about archives. You let them tell your own story," said David Watters, director of the Center for New England Culture.

He said he hoped the collection would become a big draw for both believers and skeptics.

"I hope people in the UFO world will consider this a mecca, and come to see the real stuff," he said.

At the same time, he added, public reaction to the Hills – "the story of the story," as he put it – is of interest for sociological reasons.

"This is a fascinating New Hampshire story," he said. "It belongs here."

Marden told the forum that her book title "Captured" expresses another aspect of the event: the way it took over the Hills' lives, overwhelming everything else they did.

"This was just a couple of hours in one night," she reminded the crowd, "but they couldn't get away from it."