Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. In this episode, you
Speaker 1: will hear from Stanton Friedman, a leading researcher on the
Speaker 1: Hill Encounter. A few months after I interviewed him, he
Speaker 1: passed away at the age of eighty four. I had
Speaker 1: a thoroughly enjoyable forty five minute conversation with him, during
Speaker 1: which he answered all my questions at length and gave
Speaker 1: me a good natured hard time about my skepticism. I
Speaker 1: know his passing is a loss to the UFO community,
Speaker 1: and I feel fortunate to have had the chance to
Speaker 1: chat with him. October Margine. My qualification to do this research,
Speaker 1: I've had one course of an astronomy in college about
Speaker 1: twenty years ago, which doesn't amount too much except it
Speaker 1: did show me to their placement and quite an interest
Speaker 1: in that since childhood. But my main interest is in
Speaker 1: biology and anthropology. My degree was in sociology. I went
Speaker 1: back from my teaching credits later. I also had what
Speaker 1: amounted to the pre med course with a great interest
Speaker 1: in biology. Being passion is anthropology makes um euphorology so interesting,
Speaker 1: and you can consider how many different kinds of cultures
Speaker 1: there might be, and add to this a different biological
Speaker 1: background which would lead into even more complex and far
Speaker 1: reaching cultural differences. Aspects are highly intriguing, to say the least.
Speaker 1: Betty Hill recalled being shown two objects while she was
Speaker 1: on the spacecraft. The first was a type of book
Speaker 1: containing alien symbols. We looked at this in the previous episode.
Speaker 1: The second object was more compelling and it prompted exhaustive research.
Speaker 1: Proponents of the Hill story point to it is evidence
Speaker 1: that they were in fact abducted by aliens. This object
Speaker 1: came to be called the star map. I'm tolbee ball.
Speaker 1: This is Strange Arrivals Episode four, Zeta Reticuli. Betty and
Speaker 1: Barney Hill reacted very differently during their abduction experience. Barney
Speaker 1: spent much of the time in a day's responsive to
Speaker 1: Betty's please. His hypnotic recall suggested that he regarded the
Speaker 1: experience as something to be endured, and he kept his
Speaker 1: eyes firmly shut from much of the ordeal. Betty, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, told of being energized and engaged. In particular,
Speaker 1: she carried on a conversation with one of the aliens,
Speaker 1: whom she called the leader. She says, she asked the
Speaker 1: leader to things. One was for a souvenir. The leader
Speaker 1: gave her the book with the alien symbols and then,
Speaker 1: to her frustration, took it back again. The second thing
Speaker 1: she asked was where are you from. Here's Betty from
Speaker 1: her hypnosis session on March fourteenth land across the room.
Speaker 1: Did the head of the table, and there was he
Speaker 1: did something. It wasn't like a draw, he said, I
Speaker 1: did something in the metal of the wall. There was
Speaker 1: an opening and he pulled down a map. Man He
Speaker 1: asked me, had I ever seen a map like this before?
Speaker 1: And I watched across the room and I leaned against
Speaker 1: the table and I looked at it. It was an
Speaker 1: oblong nap and he said that the heavy lines were
Speaker 1: trade routes, and then the other lines the other that
Speaker 1: the solid lines were place as they went Occasionally, he
Speaker 1: said that it's a broken lines were expeditions. Betty asked
Speaker 1: the leader to point out where he was from. He
Speaker 1: responded by asking if she knew where the Earth would
Speaker 1: be on the map. Betty said that she didn't. The
Speaker 1: leader said that if that was the case, showing her
Speaker 1: his home star on the map, wouldn't mean anything to her,
Speaker 1: and he put it away. And this at first was
Speaker 1: the whole story of the star map, as we're called
Speaker 1: under hypnosis by Betty. Barney was not in the room
Speaker 1: at the time and did not mention it. Dr Benjamin Simon,
Speaker 1: the psychiatrist who conducted the hypnosis sessions with the Hills,
Speaker 1: seems to have been intrigued by mention of the star
Speaker 1: map Betty Hill from presentation. Dr Simon gave me a
Speaker 1: post autumatic suggestion. He said, if I wanted to, I
Speaker 1: could sketch the start map, but if I didn't want it,
Speaker 1: I didn't have to. So about two weeks later I
Speaker 1: sketched it. You can easily find images of her sketch
Speaker 1: on the Internet. It was drawn on a single piece
Speaker 1: of paper. Twenty one circles and dots representing stars are
Speaker 1: spread across the page, some connected with lines and others
Speaker 1: just by themselves. I wouldn't call the resulting map crude exactly.
Speaker 1: Maybe casual is a better word. Think about what you
Speaker 1: would draw if someone asked you for a map showing
Speaker 1: how to get from the nearest highway to your house.
Speaker 1: You'd probably get all the roads and turns right but
Speaker 1: with the length of the roads be perfectly to scale.
Speaker 1: Betty's star map seems like a galactic equivalent of that
Speaker 1: kind of map, but that's not how everyone perceived it.
Speaker 1: A school teacher from Ohio named Marjorie Fish saw the
Speaker 1: star map and thought it might reveal where the aliens
Speaker 1: came from. She decided to try to figure out the
Speaker 1: vantage point in our galaxy from which the map was made.
Speaker 1: Working in the nineties, sixties and seventies, Marjorie didn't have
Speaker 1: access to a computer to pursue her research. Her efforts
Speaker 1: were decidedly analog, and they were extraordinary. In her living room,
Speaker 1: she created a series of three dimensional models of the
Speaker 1: nearby galaxy using beads hung from the ceiling by string.
Speaker 1: Here's Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and uphologist. He was
Speaker 1: a leading researcher into the Hills story for fifty years
Speaker 1: and knew both Betty and Barney and an A brilliant
Speaker 1: woman named Marjorie Fish did something nobody else had ever done.
Speaker 1: She about three dimensional models of our local galactic neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Incredibly detailed work. I mean, her biggest model had two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty six stars in it. That means you've
Speaker 1: got to have the location of the star before you
Speaker 1: can build them model little beats hung on strings. That
Speaker 1: is tedious work and now hard part at that time,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to measure distances. It's easy to measure angles.
Speaker 1: You know, we're in this sky to look. That's a
Speaker 1: two dimensional problem. But how far away is it? Ah,
Speaker 1: we had lousy data. She got the best data available.
Speaker 1: She wound up building a total of more than twenty
Speaker 1: three dimensional models and was able to find one and
Speaker 1: only one pattern that matched what Betty had drawn. Angle
Speaker 1: for angle, line length for line length. The Milne Special
Speaker 1: Collections and Archive at the University of New Hampshire's Diamond
Speaker 1: Library as a number of photographs of Marjorie Fish's models.
Speaker 1: She either used cloth or paper to create a black background.
Speaker 1: A huge number of beads are suspended in air by
Speaker 1: strings attached to the ceiling. They look like super thin icicles.
Speaker 1: Marjorie would examine the model from different spots and angles,
Speaker 1: trying to find one that match Betty's star map. It
Speaker 1: was exacting work. To get a sense of how detailed
Speaker 1: her efforts were, we can listen to a recording she
Speaker 1: made in late nineteen nine. During her work on her models,
Speaker 1: she engaged in a correspondence with a scientist named Richard Lee.
Speaker 1: In response to letters that he apparently wrote her with
Speaker 1: questions about her methods. She sent audio tapes. Most of
Speaker 1: the conversation is technical and sounds like this. Right now,
Speaker 1: I'm in the process of going through the metric parallax
Speaker 1: catalog and pulling out all these stars in the parallax
Speaker 1: of point zero four nine two point zero three. Oh,
Speaker 1: this would take all the stars from sixty five light
Speaker 1: years out to a hundred light years to supplement the
Speaker 1: fleecy catalog so that a model can be constructed of
Speaker 1: these stars. Now, this is one of my listing of
Speaker 1: stars of good have plants with life, so I'm not
Speaker 1: going to be including the stars brighter than F five.
Speaker 1: And the work was frustrating too, because she was unable
Speaker 1: to find a match in her model for Betty's map.
Speaker 1: But then a scientific discovery suddenly unlocked the maps puzzle
Speaker 1: and in the process seemed to suggest that it might
Speaker 1: truly have an extraterrestrial origin. Strange arrivals will return in
Speaker 1: a moment. Marjorie Fish went to incredible lengths building complex
Speaker 1: models to try to identify the vantage point of the
Speaker 1: star map. Her efforts went unrewarded until new astronomical data
Speaker 1: became available and she updated her model. Kathleen Martin, Betty's niece,
Speaker 1: and a UFO researcher. This one was after three additional
Speaker 1: stars were discovered by astronomers and she added them to
Speaker 1: the map, and she changed the distance data on some
Speaker 1: of the others, and then in two she had a match.
Speaker 1: To be clear, what Kathleen is saying is that Marjorie
Speaker 1: Fish was able to find a model that fit the
Speaker 1: star map until three previously undiscovered stars were identified. Once
Speaker 1: she added them to her model, she had a match.
Speaker 1: The inference here is that there is only one way
Speaker 1: Betty could have drawn the map with those stars. That is,
Speaker 1: if the map that she saw that night had information
Speaker 1: not known to scientists at the time. Could this be
Speaker 1: proof that the map was not of earthly origin. The
Speaker 1: next step was to have her work vetted for accuracy
Speaker 1: and to be verified by the scientific community. Here's Marjorie
Speaker 1: again from her audio correspondence. I had assumed that everyone
Speaker 1: in the field wanted to know where they came from.
Speaker 1: I put in cross references and extra datus, so it
Speaker 1: could be a pot chect in the matter of an
Speaker 1: hour or two and thoroughly check in our two days.
Speaker 1: Point by point the model could be built and checked
Speaker 1: inside of a week. Everything I've done can be checked.
Speaker 1: Since I've worked out all the methods, these could be
Speaker 1: out and redone for are easier in the first time
Speaker 1: of attack had to be lopped out. This is when
Speaker 1: Stanton Friedman was called in as a nuclear physicist, and
Speaker 1: this was his interest in the case. He was able
Speaker 1: to find astrophysicists to vet Marjorie's work. It also ended
Speaker 1: up being done as a computer generated analysis at Ohio
Speaker 1: State University, and what they discovered is that the two
Speaker 1: primary stars in the foreground were as they to reticulate,
Speaker 1: one and two that are about thirty nine and a
Speaker 1: half light years away, because one further away than the other,
Speaker 1: but they were only about a light year apart, which
Speaker 1: was fairly close. There were binary stars, but they could
Speaker 1: possibly maintain a stable war but so theoretically planets would
Speaker 1: be able to evolve around those stars, just like we
Speaker 1: have with our son in our solar system. Now that
Speaker 1: the stars had apparently been identified, more research could be
Speaker 1: done on the map. Betty thought that she might be
Speaker 1: able to use it to identify a purpose for the
Speaker 1: alien journeys. What we know about the universe is still
Speaker 1: all in a theory. We still don't know. You know
Speaker 1: a lot of the speculation, but the speculation is that
Speaker 1: there are party seven nearby stads that our astronomers believe
Speaker 1: have a son, and planets and conditions very similar to us.
Speaker 1: I could have advanced life now. I had sixteen of
Speaker 1: those Friday seven stars on my map out of an
Speaker 1: area of about two hundred studs in the sky. Uh
Speaker 1: the broken law well willing to staff systems which are
Speaker 1: younger than we are. Um, the heavy lines are going
Speaker 1: to send systems our age older. So it's looking it
Speaker 1: looks as though they're going out into the nearby staff systems,
Speaker 1: looking them all, finding out the stage of advancement of life,
Speaker 1: and if we're advanced enough, they come back and take
Speaker 1: another look. If we're not, if they going to younger
Speaker 1: planets and they're not advanced, they go out on an
Speaker 1: expedition and then I'll go back others. Stanton Freedman in
Speaker 1: particular sought to support the star map with scientific credibility.
Speaker 1: As we'll see that effort was met with significant pushback.
Speaker 1: I published her work in an article in UFO magazine.
Speaker 1: I guess it was something like that. And then I
Speaker 1: convinced Terry Dickinson, who was editor of Astronomy magazine. I
Speaker 1: had met Jerry had attended one of my lectors, and
Speaker 1: I told him about Marjorie's work and suggested he to
Speaker 1: an article about it. Well, he talked to a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of people. He wasn't gonna accept what I said.
Speaker 1: I mean, that was interesting, and and he looked at
Speaker 1: what I had published, and then he wrote an article.
Speaker 1: He talked to Cross SAG and he talked to a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of people. It got more response than anything
Speaker 1: they'd ever published. And he carried letters over the next
Speaker 1: year and finally put out at thirty two page full
Speaker 1: color booklet, The Zeta Reticuli Incident, and sold ten thousand
Speaker 1: copies right off the bat, which was incredible. And then
Speaker 1: Carl Sagan's attorney complained because Carl's name was on the
Speaker 1: cover with five other contributors I think it was five
Speaker 1: something like then, and threatened to sue him. Terry Dickinson,
Speaker 1: the editor of the Fledgling Astronomy Magazine, it had only
Speaker 1: been in existence for a year and a half, was
Speaker 1: clearly intrigued by the Hill's tail, and found the evidence
Speaker 1: on balance to be inconclusive. His article ends with the sentence,
Speaker 1: the only answer is to continue the search. Someday, perhaps soon,
Speaker 1: we will know. This set off nearly a year's worth
Speaker 1: of argument in Astronomy Magazine's letter section. This level of
Speaker 1: interest led to the publication of the special edition titled
Speaker 1: the Zeta Reticuli Incident. It contained Dickinson's original article and
Speaker 1: then a series of letters and responses from scientists and
Speaker 1: other experts. Carl Sagan was the host of the phenomenally
Speaker 1: popular nine eighties television show Cosmos. He was perhaps the
Speaker 1: most famous scientist in America. Marjorie felt that it would
Speaker 1: be important to bring the star map to his attention
Speaker 1: against the private him as the oddly enough, he's prejudice
Speaker 1: against youthos. This may work our favor if he's reasonably fair,
Speaker 1: although I've heard he may not be if I can
Speaker 1: get him interested enough or mad enough to try to
Speaker 1: find flaws in the data, and he can't. He says
Speaker 1: so his word as a respected scientist and as an
Speaker 1: a opponent to uthos will carry more weight. I found
Speaker 1: a two falls in his work, and that just might
Speaker 1: get him mad enough to want to find some in mine.
Speaker 1: She got Siggin's attention all right. He sent letters to
Speaker 1: Astronomy strongly taking issue with the star maps authenticity. When
Speaker 1: the special edition was published, he threatened to sue Astronomy
Speaker 1: Magazine because he had not given permission for his letters
Speaker 1: to be reprinted. The issue was pulled from the shelves.
Speaker 1: The entire data reticulous incident seems to be something of
Speaker 1: a fondly remembered embarrassment to Astronomy Magazine. In the online
Speaker 1: version of the original article, current editor David Ker writes
Speaker 1: two things happened from this absurd tale. First, it sold
Speaker 1: lots of books. Second, it nearly ruined the reputation of
Speaker 1: this young Astronomy magazine. He also says it may have
Speaker 1: caused Dickins in his job, as he was fired months later. Sagan, however,
Speaker 1: was not finished with his public criticism of the star map.
Speaker 1: His show Cosmos mostly focused on explaining space physics to
Speaker 1: a general audience, but in episode twelve Encyclopedia Galactica, he
Speaker 1: focused on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. In this episode,
Speaker 1: there's a brief segment about Betty and Barney Hill. He said,
Speaker 1: don't believe, Oh I don't. There must be a reasonable explanation.
Speaker 1: The episode begins with the bizarre dramatization of the Hills
Speaker 1: UFO encounter. Betty and Barney are depicted driving in the
Speaker 1: rain and then lurching around in a stupor. It wasn't
Speaker 1: raining the night of the Hills encounter. Of course, the
Speaker 1: scene seems calculated to make them look as silly as possible.
Speaker 1: After this unpromising start, the episode cuts to Carl Sagan,
Speaker 1: looking dapper in a tan jacket and blue shirt. He
Speaker 1: walks along the side of a grassy hill. He's carrying
Speaker 1: a path of some sort that turns out to have
Speaker 1: a simplified version of Betty's star map. This seems to
Speaker 1: be the real reason for bringing up the Hills. He
Speaker 1: goes through a sequence of comparisons between betty star map
Speaker 1: and a map of the stars from Marjorie Fish's model.
Speaker 1: The first comparison is between the two maps with the
Speaker 1: lines indicating trade routes drawn in. Sagan says they look similar,
Speaker 1: but mostly because of the lines. He then shows the
Speaker 1: Fish map with a different set of lines strawn. Now,
Speaker 1: as you'd expect, the maps suddenly look very different. But
Speaker 1: he doesn't stop there. The real test, he says, is
Speaker 1: to take a look at the maps without any lines
Speaker 1: drawn in to connect the stars and compare them that way.
Speaker 1: When he shows these two maps, they don't look much
Speaker 1: alike at all. Looking at this last pair of maps,
Speaker 1: he concludes, as read by a voice actor, and then
Speaker 1: there's very little resemblance left. But these particular stars are
Speaker 1: selected from a large catalog of star positions. Our vantage
Speaker 1: point in space is also selected to make the best
Speaker 1: possible fit with the Hill map. If you can pick
Speaker 1: and choose from a large number of stars viewed from
Speaker 1: any advantage point in space you want, you can always
Speaker 1: find something resembling the pattern you're looking for. I'm surprised
Speaker 1: that nobody could find a better fit to the Hill map.
Speaker 1: Not surprisingly, proponents of the Hill story were not amused.
Speaker 1: In response to this episode, Stanton Friedman wrote a furious
Speaker 1: letter to the senior vice president of kse CET, the
Speaker 1: public broadcasting system station that produced Cosmos. In it, he
Speaker 1: strongly objects to the portrayal of the Hill encounter and
Speaker 1: the segment on the star map. He says it is
Speaker 1: part of a clear attempt to set science up on
Speaker 1: one side and believers UFO enthusiasts on the side of
Speaker 1: religion and superstition and obviously not scientific. Freedmen clearly objects
Speaker 1: to Sagan's tone regarding quote unquote UFO enthusiasts. But the
Speaker 1: real question here is whether the map that Betty drew
Speaker 1: on a sheet of paper based on her hypnotically regressed
Speaker 1: memory provides an accurate tool to identify a distinct group
Speaker 1: of stars. I'd be willing about that if you took
Speaker 1: a handful of sunflowers so he's dropped them on a
Speaker 1: piece of paper and mark their locations, that you would
Speaker 1: be able to find someplace in the universe that matched
Speaker 1: that pattern at some rain chet some orientation, at some scale.
Speaker 1: This is author Jim McDonald. I'd also be willing to
Speaker 1: bet that the the Hill map matches somewhere else in
Speaker 1: the universe as well, or better that it matches uh
Speaker 1: the setter reticulised site. I will also bet that that
Speaker 1: same map matches the pattern of some group of towns, cities,
Speaker 1: or villages somewhere in the world. At some orientation, at
Speaker 1: some range, at some scale, or that it matches the patterns,
Speaker 1: and somebody of water islands at some body of water
Speaker 1: at some range, at some scale, at some orientation, unless
Speaker 1: and until we get to set articular and find little
Speaker 1: gray aliens. Uh, it's nothing. It's dots on a piece
Speaker 1: of paper, which you or I could make dots on
Speaker 1: a piece of paper. But it is not just the
Speaker 1: process of matching Betty's map to an actual part of
Speaker 1: the galaxy that causes problems. How how accurate could the
Speaker 1: map possibly be? Think about how difficult it would be
Speaker 1: to precisely place a series of dots and lines on
Speaker 1: a piece of paper based on something you've seen two
Speaker 1: years ago, Hosts of the Skeptoid podcast, Ryan Dunning. The
Speaker 1: claim associated with this map is that she saw this
Speaker 1: on a wall in the spaceship and then two and
Speaker 1: a half years later, remembered what it looked like, and
Speaker 1: during the hypnosis session drew this out, drew these dots
Speaker 1: on a piece of paper, and based on that, we're
Speaker 1: supposed to believe that this is an absolutely accurate, you know,
Speaker 1: to the micron depiction of stars in our local galaxy.
Speaker 1: Here somewhere that's an awfully weak point right there. When
Speaker 1: you look at a map showing a dozen dots that
Speaker 1: are in a random more or less a random distribution,
Speaker 1: are you going to be able to reproduce the positions
Speaker 1: of each one of those exactly more than two years later?
Speaker 1: That strange credib pility right there. There's no reason to
Speaker 1: think her memory of that star map would be remotely accurate,
Speaker 1: let alone accurate at all. I mean, the brain simply
Speaker 1: doesn't work that way. Our brains are not digital recorders.
Speaker 1: Our brains are abstraction engines. When you look at a
Speaker 1: map that shows a dozen dots, the only thing your
Speaker 1: brain stores is that there were a dozen dots randomly
Speaker 1: distributed on that paper, and that's the best you can
Speaker 1: do when you try to reproduce it later. There's no
Speaker 1: reason to think that this map could have been an
Speaker 1: accurate representation of something she'd seen two years before. Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan and Jim McDonald may have been right that you
Speaker 1: can find matches for any random array of stars if
Speaker 1: you search enough, But with what we know now, that
Speaker 1: seems almost beside the point, Because it is nearly impossible
Speaker 1: to believe that Betty could sketch a replica of the
Speaker 1: star map with the incredible degree of accuracy needed to
Speaker 1: identify Zata Reticuli as the alien's point of origin. This
Speaker 1: doesn't prove that Betty wasn't shown a star map by
Speaker 1: the leader or aboard a spaceship, merely that the chances
Speaker 1: that she could produce an accurate replica are essentially zero.
Speaker 1: Late in life, when more accurate data about the characteristics
Speaker 1: and locations of stars in our galaxy became available, Marjorie
Speaker 1: Fish concluded that her identification of Zeta Reticuli was not accurate.
Speaker 1: This view was mentioned in the obituary that ran when
Speaker 1: she died on April eight. Quote later, after newer data
Speaker 1: was compiled, she determined that the binary stars within the
Speaker 1: pattern were too close together to support life, so, as
Speaker 1: a true skeptic, she issued a statement that she now
Speaker 1: felt that the correlation was unlikely. Even if you concede
Speaker 1: that using the star map to locate the alien's point
Speaker 1: of origin is a dead end, it doesn't really prove
Speaker 1: the the Hill's abduction experience didn't happen. There's still this.
Speaker 1: Betty and Barney were hypnotized separately and told similar mutually
Speaker 1: supporting stories, stories they hadn't remembered before their hypnosis sessions.
Speaker 1: How can you explain this if they hadn't actually been
Speaker 1: abducted during those missing hours? Next time on Strange Arrivals.
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written
Speaker 1: and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced by Miranda Hawkins
Speaker 1: and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
Speaker 1: and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey.
Speaker 1: Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: the MILM Special Collections and Archives at the University of
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y Am in Norwich, connectic it,
Speaker 1: John White and David O'Leary, the executive producer of The
Speaker 1: History Channel's dramatic series Project Bluebook. Learn more about the
Speaker 1: show over at Grimm and Mile dot com. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.