Speaker 1: One of the great pleasures of doing sound, Light and
Speaker 1: Frequency is that no two episodes are ever alike. We
Speaker 1: go where the stories go. Sometimes that means a deep
Speaker 1: dive into a movie or a TV series, and sometimes
Speaker 1: it means discovering halfway through our preparation that the episode
Speaker 1: that we thought we were going to do has quietly
Speaker 1: turned into something else. Now, the good news is that
Speaker 1: we're constantly learning as we're doing this. Every time we
Speaker 1: put one of these episodes together, we find new connections
Speaker 1: between films and TV, but also UFO cases and UAP history,
Speaker 1: government secrecy, cultural memory, and all the weird little places
Speaker 1: that those things intersect. Now, Originally we thought that we
Speaker 1: might do an entire episode today about alien abductions and
Speaker 1: how they've been treated in movies and television. But once
Speaker 1: we started laying that one out, it became obvious that's
Speaker 1: not really an episode. It was more like a graduate seminar.
Speaker 1: People have written entire books about this, So we decided
Speaker 1: we might narrow our focus and ask a better question. So,
Speaker 1: what happens if we take two of the most famous
Speaker 1: abduction cases in history and lay them out chronologically and
Speaker 1: then look at them through the POV of Hollywood, and
Speaker 1: that is what brought us to the Betty and Barney
Speaker 1: Hill case from nineteen sixty one and the Travis Walton
Speaker 1: case from nineteen seventy five, because these are two of
Speaker 1: the best known cases of alien abduction in American culture,
Speaker 1: probably the two best known. There are also two cases
Speaker 1: that have compelled me, both personally and professionally for most
Speaker 1: of my life. Honestly to the point where to say
Speaker 1: that I was interested in them doesn't really do justice.
Speaker 1: Obsession is probably a better and more accurate way to
Speaker 1: put it. I've written about the Hills, I've dramatized them.
Speaker 1: My wife Jackie, and I have even developed their story
Speaker 1: as both a feature film and a limited TV series.
Speaker 1: I've also studied Travis Walton's case for decades, going back
Speaker 1: to actually covering it when I was a young radio
Speaker 1: guy in Eugene, Oregon. A few years ago. I even
Speaker 1: appeared as an on camera subject matter expert on the
Speaker 1: Discovery Channel when they did documentaries on both cases. And
Speaker 1: you know what I learned is, even after two separate
Speaker 1: two hour documentaries, there were still important pieces of those
Speaker 1: stories that never got explored, mainly because the executives at
Speaker 1: the network said that they didn't really belong in there.
Speaker 1: They were wrong. In today's episode, we are going to
Speaker 1: ask what was happening in film and television when Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney and Travis Walton were claiming what had happened
Speaker 1: to them? And the one question we keep coming back
Speaker 1: to on sound, light and Frequency is this this Hollywood
Speaker 1: simply reflect the UFO phenomenon or does it help shape
Speaker 1: the way that we experience and remember it, Which brings
Speaker 1: me to another thing about our show, the detours. Sometimes
Speaker 1: these detours look like we're wandering off the road, but
Speaker 1: more often than not, they bring us back to the
Speaker 1: subject in an even more interesting direction. Today, we're just
Speaker 1: going to start with one of those detours because we
Speaker 1: like where it takes us. And so the detour is this.
Speaker 1: Have you ever found yourself comparing notes with friends about
Speaker 1: where you were when some huge event occurs? People have
Speaker 1: been doing that for generations. I remember my grandparents used
Speaker 1: to talk about what they were doing when Pearl Harbor happened.
Speaker 1: These moments become personal timestamps for us. They're not just
Speaker 1: history anymore. They become part of your own story. So,
Speaker 1: now as I bring in my co host, Brent Friedman
Speaker 1: from Washington State. Brent, I'm just going to go out
Speaker 1: on a limb here and say that neither of us
Speaker 1: have a Pearl Harbor memory to start with, because I
Speaker 1: don't think we were alive.
Speaker 2: I was definitely not alive. I thought you were alive
Speaker 2: though at the time.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for that. Thank you very much. Good.
Speaker 1: I gave you one there. Listen. The first historical memory
Speaker 1: that I think we could talk about would be the
Speaker 1: JFK assassination. Let's do a lightning round of these big ones,
Speaker 1: because they're going to take us someplace interesting, So I'll
Speaker 1: give you JFK Go barely conscious. That's exactly right. That's
Speaker 1: all I was at the time. I was, I believe,
Speaker 1: a fourth grader, and I remember sitting at lunch when
Speaker 1: my teacher, Missus Braden, who was a tough task master
Speaker 1: that always made us eat our food, did not make
Speaker 1: us eat the broccoli they served that day, and instead
Speaker 1: she sat at the table and cry. So that's what
Speaker 1: I was doing on that day.
Speaker 3: That's a stark memory.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They rolled a TV set in and everything, and
Speaker 1: we watched Missus Braden cry and then they let us
Speaker 1: go home early and then we watched our parents cry.
Speaker 1: So that was JFK. I guess the other big one though,
Speaker 1: after that, that you probably do have a conscious memory of,
Speaker 1: would be what you were doing when you learned about
Speaker 1: John Lennon's murder in New York City in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: So I heard about that.
Speaker 2: I was in high school at the time, and I
Speaker 2: remember being out in kind of the quad area of
Speaker 2: the school and seeing people all huddling together like wildfire.
Speaker 2: The news spread across the lawns. Someone had heard it,
Speaker 2: and people were telling each other, and I remember being
Speaker 2: at the far end of that wave, going what is
Speaker 2: everyone talking about? When it got to me, I didn't
Speaker 2: think it was real. And then I started seeing around
Speaker 2: me some people crying, and it suddenly sunk in and
Speaker 2: I felt sick to my stomach. It just didn't make
Speaker 2: any sense. It was of course, it raised that question,
Speaker 2: why would someone kill John Lennon.
Speaker 1: I still ask myself that. Of course, I'm a few
Speaker 1: years older than you. So I actually was working. I
Speaker 1: had just started working at CNN as the Los Angeles correspondent,
Speaker 1: so I wasn't covering the main story, which was being
Speaker 1: covered by the other some other network people but in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, I think they sent me out to talk
Speaker 1: to people at a high school, so I could have
Speaker 1: been the guy interviewing people at your high school about
Speaker 1: what they thought. And I have one interesting memory though.
Speaker 1: I called my brother as soon as I heard the
Speaker 1: news that the night before when it happened. I said, Alan,
Speaker 1: John Lennon's been murdered, and he goes, what's your problem? Was?
Speaker 1: Are you calling me? And I was so offended I
Speaker 1: just hung up right. The phone rings three minutes later
Speaker 1: and he goes, I don't know what I was thinking.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I apologize. That's a huge thing. So in
Speaker 1: other words, that delayed reaction where you're like, Okay, now
Speaker 1: I get it, and that's what he had. And then,
Speaker 1: of course, I guess after Lennon, another big one for
Speaker 1: us would of course, what we were doing on that
Speaker 1: terrible morning when the towers came down for nine to eleven.
Speaker 2: So I remember getting a phone call from my mother
Speaker 2: saying what's happening?
Speaker 1: And I was.
Speaker 3: Barely awake at the time.
Speaker 2: I think I'd been working late the night before, and
Speaker 2: I was like, I don't know what is happening, and
Speaker 2: she'd go turn on the television, and so that was
Speaker 2: my indoctrination into the whole situation, and again that it
Speaker 2: seemed very surreal, like I felt, am I still dreaming?
Speaker 2: Is this really happening? It seemed impossible. It still seems impossible, Listen.
Speaker 2: I was out running. I was a runner at the time,
Speaker 2: and I'd gone run in the morning with a friend
Speaker 2: and my wife ended up driving down and finding us
Speaker 2: and saying, get in the car. We got to go home.
Speaker 2: We've got to be home. So she took me home
Speaker 2: and dropped my friend off. But then what was historically
Speaker 2: weird to me was that I had just been elected
Speaker 2: chairman of the TV Academy and the Emmys were on
Speaker 2: September sixteenth of that year, so of course nobody wanted
Speaker 2: to go to Emmy's five days after nine to eleven.
Speaker 2: So I ended up canceling them once. And I've told
Speaker 2: this before, but we set them for October seventh, and
Speaker 2: on that day we attacked Afghanistan, so we had to
Speaker 2: cancel them a second time. So the Emmys went forty
Speaker 2: nine years, never canceled before, and I had to oversee
Speaker 2: that twice. Anyway, we probably do an episode about just
Speaker 2: where we're one of those, we wouldn't have anything to
Speaker 2: do with UFOs per se.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of my point. We all remember what
Speaker 1: we were doing for those huge events, and yet there
Speaker 1: are some events that most people don't pay any attention
Speaker 1: to that in the UFO world are kind of major events.
Speaker 1: And I think the one that people now talk to
Speaker 1: each other about a little bit was what they were doing,
Speaker 1: what they were thinking when the whole UFO topic seemed
Speaker 1: to change. And that was the night of December sixteenth,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, when an online story was broken by The
Speaker 1: New York Times, and the morning of December seventeenth, twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: when the actual paper came out and this story spread
Speaker 1: like wildfire. Do you remember that day?
Speaker 2: I do, And that was interesting because again I was
Speaker 2: unaware of the breaking news, but my phone started blowing
Speaker 2: up with texts from people saying did you see it?
Speaker 3: Did you see it? What do you think? I'm like, what,
Speaker 3: what's going on?
Speaker 2: By the time I finally caught up, I remember sitting
Speaker 2: down and just reading the whole article, just inhaling it,
Speaker 2: and my thought was, Okay, so they've dropped this Knimtz
Speaker 2: case on the world, and it felt like the first
Speaker 2: drip of real closure, and I thought to myself, it's happening.
Speaker 2: Here we go now looking back on it now, Literally
Speaker 2: it was just a drip, but it felt like the
Speaker 2: world was changing, or it had changed overnight when I
Speaker 2: read that article, What about you?
Speaker 3: Where were you in the worlds?
Speaker 1: Sure did. What's interesting, My family and I have always
Speaker 1: practiced what we call parachute vacations. We just drop into
Speaker 1: a city that we know nothing about, and we get
Speaker 1: on our cell phones since cell phones have been out,
Speaker 1: and we start looking around to see what should we do,
Speaker 1: Where can we go? That kind of thing. So we
Speaker 1: had just air dropped into New Orleans at that time,
Speaker 1: and so we were in New Orleans for a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons, just because we'd never been there, and we
Speaker 1: thought the kids would enjoy that, and they did. Everybody
Speaker 1: was enjoying it. And that morning I was at the
Speaker 1: World War Two Museum in New Orleans because my wife, Jackie,
Speaker 1: and I have a World War Two movie called The
Speaker 1: Last Battle that is supposed to be shooting this year,
Speaker 1: and so we were doing some research for it, and
Speaker 1: one of the big things of the New Orleans Museum
Speaker 1: World War Two Museum is that they have a film
Speaker 1: that is narrated and hosted by Tom Hanks. So that's
Speaker 1: the big one. You crowd into the theater and you
Speaker 1: watch Time Next talk about World War Two. And I
Speaker 1: noticed that my phone had started ringing during this thing,
Speaker 1: but I didn't be My family's looking at me like
Speaker 1: glaring daggers at me. Is so are people in the theater,
Speaker 1: Like turn your phone off? So I turned my phone
Speaker 1: off right And then as I was leaving, I open
Speaker 1: up my phone and I turn it on and the
Speaker 1: first thing that pops up is that I have a
Speaker 1: phone message and this listen. We're going to get into
Speaker 1: this deeper as we go into the show because it
Speaker 1: will pay off in other ways. But it's such a
Speaker 1: crazy memory for me because it's December seventeenth, twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: and when I turn my phone on, there is a
Speaker 1: message there from I feel like, if we can put
Speaker 1: a drum roll into this, we should put we should
Speaker 1: do that because the message is from Dan Akroyd.
Speaker 2: Dan Akroyd of Ghostbusters and Live and many other amazing movies, of.
Speaker 1: Course, is an extremely well known guy in the UFO world.
Speaker 1: And just to clarify things, I had met him the
Speaker 1: month before because, like I said, I was chairman of
Speaker 1: the TV Academy, and so I went to all their events,
Speaker 1: and I'd gone to the Emmy and induction of the
Speaker 1: Hall of Fame for all the Saturday Night Live original characters,
Speaker 1: and Dan was one of them. And what was interesting
Speaker 1: is at that exact moment that night, he was standing
Speaker 1: by himself. And that's kind of wild because all the
Speaker 1: original cast was there, Jevy Chase was there, everybody. He
Speaker 1: was wild and I was thrilled to be there. But
Speaker 1: I said to my wife, I go, I'm going to
Speaker 1: go talk to Akroyd about UFOs, And she's like, you
Speaker 1: really think you should? And I went, I don't know,
Speaker 1: probably not, But I went and I introduced myself and
Speaker 1: I said that there were probably only two people in
Speaker 1: this higher party that knew as much about UFOs as
Speaker 1: he and I did. And he looks at me and
Speaker 1: he goes, so, what do you think of the Todd
Speaker 1: Ces case, which frankly is deep cut. That's a deep
Speaker 1: cut of eufology, right, Okay. But I had just talked
Speaker 1: to somebody on the phone about it, like a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks previous, and I said, that's the guy who
Speaker 1: disappeared and they couldn't find it, but they found his
Speaker 1: shoes up in the tree. And I may even be
Speaker 1: getting it wrong now, I had it more in my
Speaker 1: wheelhouse at the time, right, and so that he was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this guy does know. So we started. We had a
Speaker 1: really nice conversation, kind of an extended one at that moment,
Speaker 1: and we were passing things back and forth at the time. Afterwards, Okay,
Speaker 1: we had created emails and all that, and I had
Speaker 1: a movie at the time about Betty and Barney Hill.
Speaker 1: You see how this is all kind of how this
Speaker 1: all going, you see behind this thing. So he and
Speaker 1: I had been exchanging emails about the Betty and Barney
Speaker 1: Hill script and he had asked to read it that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. But that's not why. That's not what
Speaker 1: he said per se in this phone call. And Brent,
Speaker 1: I've never done this before because the truth is, I
Speaker 1: don't save people's phone messages. But the truth is I
Speaker 1: just could never get rid of Dan Aykroyd's phone message.
Speaker 1: It just seems if there's a historical moment, I would
Speaker 1: probably save it anyway, because hey, it's Dan Ackroyd. He
Speaker 1: was a tremendous guy. I really liked him and do
Speaker 1: like him, but I also thought, wow, this is for ufology.
Speaker 1: This is the Pearl Harbor, the JFK, the lenin the
Speaker 1: nine to eleven. This is a big deal, right, So.
Speaker 3: You're talking about the Nimetz.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the New York about Nimets and the fact that
Speaker 1: the government admits in this story that they have actually
Speaker 1: been paying good money I think twenty two million dollars
Speaker 1: in that case to study UFOs when they've been telling
Speaker 1: everybody they don't. Okay, so tend not to play these things,
Speaker 1: but it's been nine years, so I'm gonna play it.
Speaker 1: I don't think Dan would probably mind. Let's hear it,
Speaker 1: and so let's just play this thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Front page, December seventeenth, New York Times, Real UFOs kentagone.
Speaker 4: You have tried to know Ralph Bloomenthal wrote it. He
Speaker 4: wrote that great piece of Vanity Fair about Bonnie and Betty.
Speaker 4: Do you know Ralse He's great, just great. You should
Speaker 4: get to know him. If you don't, don't know why
Speaker 4: Spielberg wouldn't want to produce that big time. If you've
Speaker 4: got the rights, you're very wise. There's Zach Royd here
Speaker 4: of course, and John Simon, how old was he when
Speaker 4: that'd be a good part for me? And then James
Speaker 4: Peas was the you know you could get I don't know,
Speaker 4: q Zach or Timberlake. He was the younger Air Force officer,
Speaker 4: but that he kind of confided in. But here we are,
Speaker 4: Front Page December seventeen to two seventeen. It's just wait,
Speaker 4: what's coming? Man? Just wait? What's coming to this planet?
Speaker 3: The boy?
Speaker 4: All right? I had a fun start talking to him,
Speaker 4: see each other again. I'll tell you about the car.
Speaker 4: They may disappear in front of me.
Speaker 3: By wow, just wow. I don't know else to respond.
Speaker 1: I'm not even sure, you know, as we like to say,
Speaker 1: sometimes there's a lot to unpack. There so many things.
Speaker 1: First of all, by the way, I loved his enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for the movie. There are a couple of things not
Speaker 1: quite accurate in there for people who are Officionado's. He
Speaker 1: was suggesting he might want to play the part of
Speaker 1: doctor Benjamin Simon, who was the person who hypnotized Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney and regressed them. And I believe the young
Speaker 1: guy that he was talking about was at Peace Air
Speaker 1: Force Base b EA sse but his name was I
Speaker 1: had it on the tip of my tongue. I've lost
Speaker 1: it myself right now anyway. But the Brent, the one
Speaker 1: thought that I thought was holy crap. He ends by
Speaker 1: saying a car that they made disappear in front of me.
Speaker 1: What did you make of that one? Do you have
Speaker 1: any clue on that?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I just know he knows how to
Speaker 2: write a cliffhanger.
Speaker 1: He sure does. Listen. I didn't know at the time.
Speaker 1: It turns out, I can't say that he was confiding
Speaker 1: a story that he'd never told before at that particular moment,
Speaker 1: because this is twenty seventeen. I believe as early as
Speaker 1: two thousand and two, in an interview, he had said
Speaker 1: he was shooting a sci fi channel show called out
Speaker 1: There in New York, and he had just interviewed Stephen Greer,
Speaker 1: was about to interview Steve Bassett, and he went out
Speaker 1: at forty second and eighth Street for a cigarette. This
Speaker 1: is the story that apparently he told. He didn't tell
Speaker 1: it to me, And he says he saw a black
Speaker 1: Ford with two tall men. The plate looked pixelated to him,
Speaker 1: and then this part he's just he took a call
Speaker 1: from Britney Spears, who gets to say that. I'm excited
Speaker 1: to say dan Akroyd called me. He's talking to Britney Spears, okay,
Speaker 1: And he looks back and the car and the men
Speaker 1: are gone within seconds, all right. And he goes back
Speaker 1: inside and the producer of the show that he's doing
Speaker 1: tells him his show has been canceled.
Speaker 3: That's an eventful two minutes or whatever that was.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Wow, can he described these guys as men in
Speaker 1: black kind of guys? Speculated the vehicle may have been cloaked,
Speaker 1: So yeah, a lot of connections in there.
Speaker 2: Okay, it seems dan Akroyd has hijacked our episode and
Speaker 2: is trying to keep us from investigating Betty and Barney
Speaker 2: Hill and Travis Walton.
Speaker 1: But he's not going to get away with it. Listen,
Speaker 1: the reason I had to play this is if not now,
Speaker 1: when And also I would imagine about ninety nine point
Speaker 1: nine percent of the people in our audience, whether they're
Speaker 1: listening or viewing, have great affection for dan Akroyd and
Speaker 1: who doesn't. Yeah, exactly. But in addition to affection respect
Speaker 1: because he was outspoken on this topic before outspoken was acceptable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, very true.
Speaker 1: It was true. It was fringe when he was doing
Speaker 1: those things, and so good for him anyway. We're going
Speaker 1: to unpack more of that in just a few minutes.
Speaker 1: I'm Bryce's able. Sometimes there's a secret connection between the
Speaker 1: UFO issue and Hollywood.
Speaker 2: I'm Brent Friedman, and that's what we talk about on Sound,
Speaker 2: Light and Frequency today.
Speaker 1: We're asking if there's a feedback loop between movies and
Speaker 1: TV and what's really going on, especially when it comes
Speaker 1: to abductions.
Speaker 2: We're going to break it all down on this episode
Speaker 2: and we'll be right back back.
Speaker 1: One of the things when we were trying to lay
Speaker 1: this out, we thought we could make it based on
Speaker 1: topics and that kind of thing. We thought that's going
Speaker 1: to be confusing, that could be a little tough. So instead,
Speaker 1: what we're going to do is walk through this storyline
Speaker 1: that combines Betty and Barney and Travis, and we're going
Speaker 1: to do it chronologically. And as we do this, I
Speaker 1: think you'll see where there are some intersections that maybe
Speaker 1: you didn't see coming. So let's talk Betty and Barney first,
Speaker 1: because they kicked this thing off. The date that you
Speaker 1: want to remember is September nineteenth, nineteen sixty one, and
Speaker 1: that means that we are coming up on the sixty
Speaker 1: fifth anniversary of Betty and Barney Hill abduction, and Brent
Speaker 1: the thing that has always compelled me and why I
Speaker 1: believe Betty and Barney are such an important story just
Speaker 1: for ufology, but also just because they were the first,
Speaker 1: and that's what makes it exciting. So many firsts. It
Speaker 1: is a time where they were the first alien abduction
Speaker 1: to ever be claimed in the United States. There had
Speaker 1: been an abduction claim in nineteen fifty seven in Brazil
Speaker 1: Antonio vs. Boaz, but we're not talking about We're talking
Speaker 1: about Betty and Barney first one in the US. It
Speaker 1: was the first reported case of missing time. It was
Speaker 1: the first use of hypnotic regression to recover abduction memories.
Speaker 1: It was the first public description of what we now
Speaker 1: know is the Grays, and it was the first time
Speaker 1: a couple that ever experienced a simultaneous abduction. So this
Speaker 1: one had it all very compelling. Now, the thing about
Speaker 1: it that I think Bear's emphasis at this point is
Speaker 1: it's not like this was covered in the newspapers, all right.
Speaker 1: September twenty first, nineteen sixty one is when it happened
Speaker 1: to them, but it's not when it became public, which
Speaker 1: we'll get to. But first let's talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about what happened to them. There's two parts to the
Speaker 1: Betty and Barney story. It's like what they knew happened
Speaker 1: to them when they came home that night, and then
Speaker 1: there's a part that happens later when they have the
Speaker 1: hypnotic progression. I realize you're not an obsessed, a hill
Speaker 1: obsessive like myself. What do you remember about their story?
Speaker 1: If you think about it, what's your takeaway?
Speaker 3: It's funny.
Speaker 2: I really didn't know much about the case until we
Speaker 2: started writing Dark Skies, and that became the first actual
Speaker 2: case that Lowengard went and investigated in our Dark Sky's pilot,
Speaker 2: And it was through that research that I even came
Speaker 2: to know about the case. I think that the big
Speaker 2: takeaway for me was the concept of missing time, that
Speaker 2: they both had this experience together, and that one of
Speaker 2: the possible explanations was this idea of shared amnesia that
Speaker 2: they had both forgotten. Was it two weeks or no,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, two hours of their lives?
Speaker 1: I think we should actually go back to the beginning,
Speaker 1: beginning then, because on September twenty first, nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: September nineteenth, rather, I believe yees September nineteenth, Betty and
Speaker 1: Barney had been married for a year. They're an interracial couple,
Speaker 1: all right. Yes, Barney is a black man married to
Speaker 1: a white woman in nineteen sixty one in New Hampshire
Speaker 1: where there's not a lot of black people anyway, but
Speaker 1: he was still involved with the NAACP. He had been married,
Speaker 1: she had been married. Before their marriage is ended, they
Speaker 1: got together, they got married. A year goes by. They're
Speaker 1: living in New Hampshire and they decide they should have
Speaker 1: a much delayed honeymoon, all right, So they go for
Speaker 1: the weekend to Montreal. That's their plan to go to
Speaker 1: Montreal and have a honeymoon. And they decide. While they're
Speaker 1: in Montreal, they hear news that there's going to be
Speaker 1: a weather disturbance. There might be some serious problems on
Speaker 1: the way back, so they decide to leave home early.
Speaker 1: So they're leaving the night of the nineteenth, of course,
Speaker 1: and they stop and have something to eat on the
Speaker 1: way down, and then they try to push on. They're
Speaker 1: going to push on from ten o'clock on. They're going
Speaker 1: to push on to home, and as they're driving along
Speaker 1: near Indian Head in the White Mountains, they see something
Speaker 1: and at first they think maybe it's a satellite, and
Speaker 1: then they or it's just lights. And then Betty, I think,
Speaker 1: is famously saying do satellites go backwards? Because this thing
Speaker 1: isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. And they
Speaker 1: stop in the middle of the road because they want
Speaker 1: to look at this thing, and they get out binoculars
Speaker 1: that Barney had, and this is all conscious memory. None
Speaker 1: of this is miss time yet this is what they're experiencing.
Speaker 1: They see a flying saucer and it has a double
Speaker 1: row of windows, so they're seeing this now. Barney with
Speaker 1: his binoculars, puts it up and he's looking at this
Speaker 1: double row of windows and he sees beings looking back
Speaker 1: at him. Yes, okay, And that's even in our scene
Speaker 1: in Dark Skies where he says, I see beings looking
Speaker 1: back at me and it's crazy, Okay. Then they hear
Speaker 1: a buzzing sound, beep beep. That's my impersonation of it.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was creepier and scarier, but that's where
Speaker 1: the thing happens. Now They find themselves after this beeping
Speaker 1: sound like thirty five miles away, I want to say,
Speaker 1: and a couple of hours have gone on by have
Speaker 1: gone hours, two hours of missing time. Think about that,
Speaker 1: but they don't really. They're like, did we fall asleep?
Speaker 1: They're just not quite sure what's gone on. So they
Speaker 1: press on and they get back to their home in Portsmouth,
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, and they get back later than they're comfortable with.
Speaker 1: They thought that they would have been there earlier. And
Speaker 1: they realize that Betty's new dress is torn. That's weird.
Speaker 1: They realize that Barney's brand new shoes are scuffed terribly
Speaker 1: on the top of them. That's weird. They both feel
Speaker 1: kind of clammy and violated. I believe. They take showers.
Speaker 1: The next day, they get out a compass and go
Speaker 1: over their car and over the trunk. The compass is
Speaker 1: going wild, and there are marks half dollar sized round
Speaker 1: spots on the trunk. The car clock and their own
Speaker 1: watches have stopped. This is all what they're experiencing. They
Speaker 1: try to do the responsible thing. They call the peace
Speaker 1: Air Force base and report it and they I think
Speaker 1: it's Henderson. It's a Henderson who takes their report young guy.
Speaker 1: They also report it to the National Investigations Committee for
Speaker 1: Aerial Phenomenon. So that basically is what happens. And over
Speaker 1: the course of time after that, Betty is having dreams.
Speaker 1: She's waking up in the middle of the night, and
Speaker 1: her dreams are odd dreams, but they are basically describing
Speaker 1: something that is a sort of riff on the abduction thing,
Speaker 1: but their dreams. Yes, they put up with this for
Speaker 1: a while. And in fact that the thing I always
Speaker 1: found was profound is that Barney, who was a postal worker,
Speaker 1: is so disturbed by whatever happened to them that he
Speaker 1: ends up getting paid leave for his health well.
Speaker 2: Quite a while, like I think months, almost yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And I found it interesting too, and I think it's
Speaker 2: a significant part of ultimately the story. And what then
Speaker 2: finds its way into the movie was that Betty wrote
Speaker 2: down all of her dreams, almost like in a dream
Speaker 2: journal or something. So that was all something that was
Speaker 2: being referenced later, and.
Speaker 1: They drew pictures of what they saw separately and then
Speaker 1: compared them. They were disturbed. They told, of course Betty's
Speaker 1: sister about it, and so some people knew about it anyway.
Speaker 1: So this goes on for a while, and we're going
Speaker 1: to come back to another piece of that story. But
Speaker 1: if you move forward in the actual key story, it's
Speaker 1: February twenty second of nineteen sixty four, all right now
Speaker 1: that remember from September of sixty one to February of
Speaker 1: that's a little over two years, two years and four
Speaker 1: months or something like that. And at this point they
Speaker 1: are so disturbed that they have sought help and they
Speaker 1: have founded doctor Benjamin Simon, who is the guy that
Speaker 1: Acroyd wanted to play in this movie I had written. Okay,
Speaker 1: and they are hypnotized, and for people that have heard
Speaker 1: the hypnosis tapes, they are harrowing. Barney is screaming, Betty
Speaker 1: is crying, and they report a story that is now
Speaker 1: pretty well known, which is their cargets stopped. The beings
Speaker 1: walk them on to a landed craft. They get on.
Speaker 1: They are and it's not the purpose of this show,
Speaker 1: by the way, to go into the deep details. There
Speaker 1: are books out and there are lots of documentaries things
Speaker 1: like that for people that want to know more, but
Speaker 1: in essence print they go on board the craft and
Speaker 1: they're separated. Barney goes into one room, Betty goes into
Speaker 1: another room. Barney is a little more constrained. He is,
Speaker 1: actually the joke is not a joke to him. He
Speaker 1: has a rectal exam, he or some device of some kind.
Speaker 1: He also has some device placed over his junk and
Speaker 1: takes some kind of sample from that. Betty gets it
Speaker 1: a little bit better, although in a frightening way. She
Speaker 1: gets a needle that she describes as about yay long
Speaker 1: put through her belly button, which one of these creatures,
Speaker 1: these are the sort of the gray Light creatures, describes
Speaker 1: as being a pregnancy test, which, frankly, they did start
Speaker 1: doing pregnancy test am neocentesis through the belly, but not
Speaker 1: till the seventies, so nobody he'd never heard of this.
Speaker 2: A couple things to jump in here on a detail
Speaker 2: that when we were researching this for this episode that
Speaker 2: I wasn't aware of is I thought that Whitley Strieber
Speaker 2: was the first one to ever have the rectal exam,
Speaker 2: and it turns out no, it's Barney. Also, yes, they
Speaker 2: put something on his junk and then he had genital
Speaker 2: wartz yes for a while after that. So something happened
Speaker 2: clearly to them physically, mentally, emotionally, and it's one of
Speaker 2: the ironies that I find about the whole story is
Speaker 2: their reluctance to talk about it because UFOs were taboo,
Speaker 2: and yet they're an interracial couple, right right, And somehow
Speaker 2: UFOs were more taboo than being an interracial couple.
Speaker 1: So true. And now is where we get into the sound,
Speaker 1: light and frequency part of this little story, okay, because
Speaker 1: over the years skeptics have bent over backwards to try
Speaker 1: to figure out, how can we undermine this story, and
Speaker 1: they've come up with one and it has been floated
Speaker 1: several times over the years, and it goes back to
Speaker 1: Outer Limits, the TV show that was the compatriot to
Speaker 1: the Twilight Zone, only the Outer Limits had more aliens
Speaker 1: and was less metaphoric and less preachy, but was about
Speaker 1: scary monsters from outer space in many cases. Okay, and okay,
Speaker 1: I said, February twenty second, sixty four is when they
Speaker 1: first get regressed, and that goes on. But it was
Speaker 1: February twenty second. I guess what happened, And this is
Speaker 1: what people point out. On February tenth of sixty four,
Speaker 1: which is twelve days earlier, Outer Limits airs a show
Speaker 1: called The Balero Shield and the story tells something about
Speaker 1: a power hungry woman who traps a benevolent non human
Speaker 1: alien to steal his impenetrable force field. I tried to
Speaker 1: watch it the other night for this. Okay, yes, there
Speaker 1: is an alien that has some kind of wrap around eyes,
Speaker 1: but doesn't look like any gray I've seen it pretty bad.
Speaker 1: Have you ever tried to watch these Twilight Zones in
Speaker 1: recent time Outer Limits? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yes, I think interestingly, Twilight Zone holds up a little
Speaker 2: better because they were parables, and this felt like these
Speaker 2: were trying to be like cutting edge science fiction of
Speaker 2: the day. So yeah, particularly the alien part of this
Speaker 2: did not age well. Look, I found the whole thing,
Speaker 2: the whole story bizarre to begin with. It was interesting
Speaker 2: to me that the alien was depicted as benevolent and
Speaker 2: that the woman was the insane one, the one who
Speaker 2: ruined everything, and that her whole goal was trying to
Speaker 2: steal the alien technology because she was ambitious and she
Speaker 2: wanted to give it to her husband so that he
Speaker 2: could impress his father and make lots of money. And
Speaker 2: that set all of the events into motion. In terms
Speaker 2: of how the alien looked, I think if you showed
Speaker 2: it to me, now and you said, what does this
Speaker 2: look like, I'd say it looks like some sort of
Speaker 2: nuclear bomb mute and it did not look at all
Speaker 2: to me like an alien. And yet that's how it
Speaker 2: was depicted at the time. And you mentioned the wrap
Speaker 2: around eyes, and that's the connective tissue between the I
Speaker 2: think what people point to is the connective tissue is
Speaker 2: those wrap around eyes were part of how Betty and
Speaker 2: Barney described the aliens that they saw.
Speaker 1: So people are then trying to you know, the skeptics
Speaker 1: are saying, see, they must have got that. And in fact,
Speaker 1: just to complete the turn here, on February seventeenth, a
Speaker 1: week after the Balero Shield aired, there was one air
Speaker 1: called The Children of Spider County, which also has aliens
Speaker 1: in it. And so the skeptics would like you to
Speaker 1: believe that Barney and Betty somehow watched this Outer Limits,
Speaker 1: which they deny having seen. But let's say that they
Speaker 1: did and they didn't remember it, or their denial is wrong, whatever,
Speaker 1: I guess the question would be. Brent, let me just
Speaker 1: ask you this hypothetically. If I made you watch a
Speaker 1: couple of movies about serial killers and some TV series
Speaker 1: about serial killers, you think you'd go murder somebody. Do
Speaker 1: you think you'd talk about murdering somebody that you hadn't
Speaker 1: murdered while you were hypnotized.
Speaker 2: Considering how many movies I've seen about people getting murdered,
Speaker 2: I'm proud of the fact I have murdered no one.
Speaker 1: Yet I'm even more proud.
Speaker 2: Yes, thank you, I know. But your point is well taken.
Speaker 2: I think just because maybe you did see an episode
Speaker 2: does not mean that in particular, I think the context
Speaker 2: is important here. You're an interracial couple, You're trying to
Speaker 2: fly below the radar. You're just trying to be happy
Speaker 2: and in love your newlyweds. Why on earth would you
Speaker 2: go and invent a story that brings so much negative
Speaker 2: attention to you? It just makes no sense. And that
Speaker 2: this would all possibly be spurred by consciously or subconsciously
Speaker 2: seeing an Outer Limits episode. Think about how ridiculous that
Speaker 2: sounds as I'm saying the.
Speaker 1: Words, and yet people have literally tried to make that connection. Okay,
Speaker 1: moving forward then, so we're just trying to say though
Speaker 1: there's an interrelationship, or at least people have tried to
Speaker 1: interrelate this. It's the UFO version of Chicken in the egg. Yes, right, okay,
Speaker 1: So bouncing forward over a year, the Boston Traveler, which
Speaker 1: is a newspaper in the Boston area, obviously, is the
Speaker 1: first to ever report the Betty and Barney case. This
Speaker 1: happens in October twenty fifth and twenty sixth of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five. All right, Now, the guy who wrote those articles,
Speaker 1: he's a guy named John Latrelle, and he was an investigative
Speaker 1: reporter and a damn good one. He had won awards,
Speaker 1: he had broken big stories, and he heard about the
Speaker 1: Betty in Barney Hills story. He chased the story like
Speaker 1: a good investigative reporter would, and they published that in
Speaker 1: late nineteen sixty five. But guess what, he's the forgotten
Speaker 1: man in this story, because what everybody else says is,
Speaker 1: oh no, it's that book, the Interrupted Journey, that is
Speaker 1: the one that's where their story went public. That happened
Speaker 1: a full year later. So I think one of the
Speaker 1: things that we can do here on this show is
Speaker 1: pay service and tribute to John Lattrell because he's the
Speaker 1: guy that broke the story. And in fact, my advocacy
Speaker 1: of John Lttrell goes back to I wrote a series
Speaker 1: of medium articles during the pandemic called the Lost Honeymoon
Speaker 1: by sort of investigation in the Betty and Barney thing.
Speaker 1: And the one thing I tried to do is write
Speaker 1: the history and make it clear that John Lttrell did this.
Speaker 1: And what's so interesting is because I started getting into that, Brent,
Speaker 1: there is a historical marker in New Hampshire on the
Speaker 1: Highway about Betty and Barney that I found had two
Speaker 1: fact errors in it because of my research and the
Speaker 1: Highway Department after I told him, I said, we're going
Speaker 1: to change the marker. Now I don't think they've changed
Speaker 1: it yet, but let me tell you what it does say.
Speaker 1: It says Betty and Barney Hill Incident. On the night
Speaker 1: of September nineteen to twenty, nineteen sixty one, Portsmouth, New
Speaker 1: Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced a close encounter
Speaker 1: with an unidentified flying object and two hours of lost
Speaker 1: time while driving south on Route three near Lincoln. They
Speaker 1: filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report of
Speaker 1: our brightly lit cigar shaped craft the next day, but
Speaker 1: were not public with their story until it was leaked
Speaker 1: in The Boston Traveler in nineteen sixty five. This was
Speaker 1: the first widely reported UF abduction report in the United States.
Speaker 1: Here are the two factors. Fact are number one, the
Speaker 1: idea that Betty and Barney Hill were not public with
Speaker 1: their story. It's just not true. How else would Jonathan
Speaker 1: Latrell have found it? Okay, they did not actively seek publicity,
Speaker 1: but that the idea that they were not public with
Speaker 1: their story is something that people with an interest in
Speaker 1: making Betty and Barney victims have conveniently ignored. But the
Speaker 1: truth is they told their story to numerous individuals as
Speaker 1: I would, frankly, if I'd been abducted, and if you'd
Speaker 1: been at you probably tell a few people about it.
Speaker 1: They told friends, They told their family, They told some
Speaker 1: of their neighbors. They had renters who were renting above them,
Speaker 1: they told them. They told a whole bunch of their
Speaker 1: church members where they were going to church about it.
Speaker 1: They told co workers. Betty she was a caseworker for
Speaker 1: the Welfare department, Barney was at the post office. They
Speaker 1: told people about it. Plus they filed two reports as
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, the US Air Force and Nightcap. They
Speaker 1: were certainly out there with their story. It was ripe
Speaker 1: for the picking for a reporter. So it wasn't like,
Speaker 1: as they said, they were not public with their story.
Speaker 1: Define public, okay. In fact Air number two, it says
Speaker 1: here their story was leaked in the Boston Traveler. The
Speaker 1: Boston Traveler did not leak the story of Betty and
Speaker 1: Barney Hill. The newspaper reported it. People leaked the newspapers.
Speaker 1: They'll call up a reporter and say, hey, I got
Speaker 1: some stuff that I'm going to leak to you. But
Speaker 1: newspapers don't leak. That's not what reporters do. They report.
Speaker 1: And there was nothing untoward about what this guy had done.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I pointed that out to this state of
Speaker 1: New Hampshire and they said they're going to change the
Speaker 1: thing because of it. So I don't know, I feel done,
Speaker 1: so thank you. There are so few things, and I
Speaker 1: hope they do change it, because I do think those
Speaker 1: two things are not accurate, and if we're going to
Speaker 1: be transparent about things, we've got to be transparent about
Speaker 1: Betty and Barney. And then, of course that takes us
Speaker 1: to the big book, The Interrupted Journey, which does come
Speaker 1: out a year after Latrell's work in October of sixty six,
Speaker 1: and it becomes the definitive public text of the case,
Speaker 1: and it is based heavily on these hypnosis tapes and
Speaker 1: interviews with the two of them, so allowed to bring
Speaker 1: this all together in October of sixty six. This is
Speaker 1: all happening, and this is important because the Interrupted Journey
Speaker 1: is going to become optioned as a movie. So this
Speaker 1: is all going to be part of that story and
Speaker 1: it becomes a gigantic story in the United States. Not
Speaker 1: because of that book. First, although the book was huge
Speaker 1: because it was excerpted in Look magazine at the time,
Speaker 1: right in October fourth, October eighteenth book Club. It was
Speaker 1: in the magazine a board of Flying Saucer. I remember this,
Speaker 1: to be honest with you, print because my mother read
Speaker 1: them and she turned to me and she was like,
Speaker 1: this is very strange because suddenly again this crossed over
Speaker 1: into the mainstream. Look and life couldn't be more mainstream,
Speaker 1: right and now, because we're talking about media, this one's
Speaker 1: kind of cool. Two months after those excerpts in Look
Speaker 1: magazine and the book coming out, Barney Hill appears on
Speaker 1: to tell the truth. This is a great moment in
Speaker 1: media history. Yes, you were such a young pup, you
Speaker 1: probably had no idea about the no idea. Here's how
Speaker 1: the it's a game show. They had a celebrity panel
Speaker 1: and they would bring three people out, and they did
Speaker 1: on this one. And in fact, if people want to
Speaker 1: see it, you can go to hollywoodufos dot com, which
Speaker 1: is our site, and you can go actually look at it.
Speaker 1: But three guys come out. Another guy is black, another
Speaker 1: guy is white, and all three of them go, my
Speaker 1: name is Barney Hill. My name is Barney Hill. My
Speaker 1: name is Barney Hill. So you got to three guys
Speaker 1: stand of Barney Hill. The celebrity people ask them questions
Speaker 1: and then they vote on who they think is Barney Hill.
Speaker 1: And then at the end of it, the host says,
Speaker 1: with a real Barney Hill, please stand up. Barney Hill
Speaker 1: was picked. They said, we think he's Barney Hill. They
Speaker 1: got it right. The real Barney Hill stood up because
Speaker 1: there was an authenticity to the guy.
Speaker 2: Talk about an interrupted journey. They went from being newlyweds
Speaker 2: to having the most like you said, probably the seminal
Speaker 2: abduction case at least in this country, happened to them
Speaker 2: and play out and go over years. I think one
Speaker 2: point I want to go back to for a second
Speaker 2: and correct me if I'm wrong. But when you were
Speaker 2: making the point that they shared the story with a
Speaker 2: lot of people, the story still had a two.
Speaker 3: Hour gap in it.
Speaker 2: They remembered what had happened up until this missing time,
Speaker 2: and they remembered what had happened after. But that was
Speaker 2: the thing, the piece that It wasn't until the hypnotic
Speaker 2: regressions years later that they started to really the whole
Speaker 2: story started to bloom as it were.
Speaker 1: Well, this is another place where you got to give
Speaker 1: Jonathan Latrell his props. Okay, Boston Traveler reporter Jonathan Latrell
Speaker 1: got hold of the tapes or the transcript of the tape.
Speaker 1: Now he knew about him, and they're in his report.
Speaker 1: Oh somebody, if anybody leaked anything, it was the tapes
Speaker 1: that were leaking, and it was who knows. I don't
Speaker 1: think we know. I don't have a knowledge personally of
Speaker 1: that right now, but I know that it's in the
Speaker 1: Boston Traveler thing. So in fact, and like I said,
Speaker 1: have you ever heard those tapes?
Speaker 4: I have not.
Speaker 1: They're frightening as all f I'm sure you're a fine actor,
Speaker 1: having gone been a theater student and all that, you
Speaker 1: couldn't have faked him. They're so good. Betty's hysterically crying,
Speaker 1: He's screaming in fear. Whatever. Okay, so now we've walked
Speaker 1: this through and here comes our pivot point that in
Speaker 1: this lovely little story that's going to pivot us into
Speaker 1: the Travis Walton case. All right, to tell the truth
Speaker 1: happens in December of sixty six. Okay, nine years later
Speaker 1: they make a movie about it and air it. Okay.
Speaker 1: The movie is called The UFO Incident. It's based on
Speaker 1: optioning the book. So again Latrelle gets screwed. He should
Speaker 1: have had he was the original guy. They should have
Speaker 1: optioned his book or somebody else should, I mean, his articles.
Speaker 1: But what's interesting about this is that Barney is played
Speaker 1: by James Earl Jones, right, And James Earl Jones was
Speaker 1: the guy that became fascinated with the case and fought
Speaker 1: and he had to fight some people off to get
Speaker 1: the rights to the book. He wanted to play Barney
Speaker 1: Hill and so.
Speaker 3: He does an amazing job.
Speaker 1: He does, and Estill Parsons is Betty. And all I
Speaker 1: would say about this is, Okay, they didn't have any
Speaker 1: money for this thing. They had the rights everything inside
Speaker 1: the ship is dark by design because they had a
Speaker 1: pretty flensy set. The aliens look pretty bad, right, But
Speaker 1: what's good, as you point out, is James Earl Jones
Speaker 1: and is still Parsons are pretty good. Honestly. I watched
Speaker 1: it again a couple of nights ago, Brent. It could
Speaker 1: be a stage play. Yes. To me.
Speaker 2: The big takeaway was yes, as a riveting piece of
Speaker 2: UFO cinema, it doesn't quite hold up. I think the
Speaker 2: performances are the standouts here, But you tell me the
Speaker 2: regression scenes, which are the heart and soul of the
Speaker 2: whole movie, where they keep coming cutting in and out
Speaker 2: of those as they're trying to tell the whole story.
Speaker 2: They were using the transcripts from the actual regressions, right,
Speaker 2: That's what was being re enacted, and those, like you said,
Speaker 2: were quite harrowing, but quite well performed. Those performances were
Speaker 2: very powerful. That's the reason I would recommend the movie.
Speaker 1: And again, hollywoodufos dot com, we'll take you to a
Speaker 1: link that allows you to watch it if you want.
Speaker 1: But here's where it gets interesting, and I love this
Speaker 1: little connection. The UFO Incident airs on NBC on October twentieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five. It's a TV movie, it's not a feature. Now,
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five, there are only three networks. There's
Speaker 1: not even Fox. You have ABC, NBC, and CBS. So
Speaker 1: when you're watching TV at night, back in nineteen seventy five, Brint,
Speaker 1: it didn't have a lot of options. You really watched,
Speaker 1: as I've always said, the least objectionable programming. You looked
Speaker 1: at the three things that were on, and the one
Speaker 1: that sucked the least is what you watched. So even
Speaker 1: something that people didn't like got a pretty healthy number.
Speaker 1: The number for something that was shunned by America would
Speaker 1: still be bigger than most shows today. Okay, but this
Speaker 1: was popular, so many Americans saw this movie on October
Speaker 1: twentieth at nineteen seventy five. Guess what. Travis Walton is
Speaker 1: abducted on November fifth, nineteen seventy five, and if you're
Speaker 1: doing the math, that is two weeks later. Okay, Now
Speaker 1: it raises questions because back then, to just refresh everybody's memory,
Speaker 1: Travis Walton was a woodcutter, okay, and he was working
Speaker 1: on a crew I believe of six people in the
Speaker 1: Pache Sitgreaves National Forest near Hebrew, Arizona, and they would
Speaker 1: go out and I believe they were thinning wood. And
Speaker 1: one night on the way home, they see a reddish
Speaker 1: light and they go over to investigate because they're in
Speaker 1: the middle of freaking nowhere. Okay, that's how they spent
Speaker 1: their days. And there's a there's no doubt about what
Speaker 1: they say they saw. They saw a craft, a giant
Speaker 1: metallic craft hovering and Travis Walton gets out of the
Speaker 1: car to get a better look. And he goes to
Speaker 1: look at this thing.
Speaker 3: Only one he's the only one that gets Everyone else.
Speaker 1: Is in the car going, holy shit, look at this
Speaker 1: and they're all afraid. But Travis goes out to look
Speaker 1: at this thing and he gets blasted by something when
Speaker 1: he looks, and then he tries to run back to
Speaker 1: the car, but he gets blasted in the chest by
Speaker 1: something from this craft that knocks him back. According to
Speaker 1: these guys, ten to twenty feet that's a pretty healthy blast.
Speaker 1: And you know what the guys in the car do.
Speaker 1: They split, they take off. They're freaking out. They think
Speaker 1: he's dead and they're going to be dead next so
Speaker 1: they take off. They get a little ways down the road,
Speaker 1: and one of the guys on the crew says, we
Speaker 1: can't leave Travis there. We've got to go back and
Speaker 1: get him. They go back to get him and he
Speaker 1: ain't there. He's not there, And for five days, Travis
Speaker 1: Walton is missing. He's gone, and the authorities believe these
Speaker 1: five guys have killed him. They're murder suspects. It's a
Speaker 1: great freaking story. And the reason I know it's a
Speaker 1: great freaking story is I was a extremely young radio
Speaker 1: reporter on the morning show at KZLFM in Eugene, Okay, where,
Speaker 1: to be honest with it was a hippie station, and
Speaker 1: I saw this stuff coming over the Zodiac News service
Speaker 1: and I started reading it. I wasn't there to cover it,
Speaker 1: but I started reading it, and I got so much
Speaker 1: interest from people who were like, oh my, you got
Speaker 1: to tell us more about that case. Everybody was following
Speaker 1: that case because it looked like a murder case. And
Speaker 1: in the middle of this murder case, they put everybody
Speaker 1: on light it detectors. And guess what those guys passed
Speaker 1: the light detector tests.
Speaker 3: Think yes, one of them was inconclusive.
Speaker 1: Well, because that guy had a criminal record apparently, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't eager to be light detected about much of anything,
Speaker 1: but in general, they all passed light detectors christ correct.
Speaker 1: Five days later, Travis Walton shows up at least, but
Speaker 1: in the movie he's naked. I don't think he was
Speaker 1: completely naked in real life.
Speaker 2: He had lost a lot of his clothes. I think
Speaker 2: in real life though.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, well that can happen when you're abducted. So
Speaker 1: what's fascinating about this story then, and why it fits
Speaker 1: into this chicken and Egg UFO thing is why because
Speaker 1: here's a guy that disappears, and yet his friends say
Speaker 1: there was a UFO that blasted him twenty feet back,
Speaker 1: and then he disappeared, but then he shows up again.
Speaker 1: All right, Travis and his friends all said, we never
Speaker 1: saw the UFO incident. We knew nothing about that. And look,
Speaker 1: I happen to believe Travis Walton's telling the Stone truth
Speaker 1: about what happened to him, because they passed the light
Speaker 1: detector tests and Travis passed them when you see back. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's a pretty strong thing. Plus, you got even
Speaker 1: if Travis hadn't been abducted, you would have had this
Speaker 1: many people having a sighting of a UFO at the
Speaker 1: same time, all of who passed light to it. That
Speaker 1: would have made it a great sighting on its own
Speaker 1: if he hadn't been abducted. But skeptics will say, and
Speaker 1: I have to say, I think they might have a
Speaker 1: point here, which is, at that time, you got six
Speaker 1: guys going out to cut wood all day, They're having
Speaker 1: lunch together, they're driving up together, they're driving home together.
Speaker 1: There's only three networks in America. The UFO incident is
Speaker 1: two weeks earlier. I don't believe that they never spoke
Speaker 1: about that. I'm sure that they did. It just seems
Speaker 1: logical that out of six guys, one of them saw
Speaker 1: the UFO incident. And if you're out there cutting wood,
Speaker 1: you're going to talk about it now. I don't know,
Speaker 1: do you buy that or what is your take on.
Speaker 2: The way that I think about this group of guys.
Speaker 2: I could imagine that they it wouldn't have been on
Speaker 2: their radar. They would have treated it as ridiculous, I mean,
Speaker 2: like it was just Hollywood nonsense. So I think the
Speaker 2: other side of this argument is the one that's harder
Speaker 2: to imagine, which is, if you take all of the
Speaker 2: facts that you just laid out. Then you have to say, okay,
Speaker 2: so what happened was I think in actuality it was
Speaker 2: seven guys and in the movie they reduced it to five.
Speaker 2: So anyway, but Travis and his logger friends are out
Speaker 2: there and they come something happens, and they come up
Speaker 2: with a story that they all agree on and have
Speaker 2: enough of the facts correct that they can pass all
Speaker 2: of each of them lie detector tests. That is going
Speaker 2: to then when Travis comes back, he articulates the exact
Speaker 2: same story, so that they would have worked all of
Speaker 2: this out, would have put themselves through five days of
Speaker 2: misery where they are being accused of murder or at
Speaker 2: least investigated for murder, their friends and their family or
Speaker 2: everyone in town is looking at them like villains, and
Speaker 2: that this was all something they decided to bring upon
Speaker 2: themselves to create this hoax. It just it's a lot,
Speaker 2: a lot, Like it's a lot to imagine that I
Speaker 2: have a lot of guy friends. You put us all together,
Speaker 2: we can't agree on what bar to go to, right,
Speaker 2: So the idea that you could construct this whole elaborate
Speaker 2: story and stick to all the details when there was
Speaker 2: no apparent reason, like what's the positive outcome of this.
Speaker 1: The only positive that's ever been speculated about is the
Speaker 1: fact that they were behind on their contract to clear
Speaker 1: this wood, and because they were about to default on
Speaker 1: their contract. And again I don't I'm not an expert
Speaker 1: on these specific pieces, but the theory of the skeptics
Speaker 1: was so they made up this thing so that it
Speaker 1: was an act of God that got them out of
Speaker 1: their contract situation.
Speaker 2: So on that point, when we were researching this episode,
Speaker 2: I watched an interview with Travis Walton where they talked
Speaker 2: about the discrepancies between his experience and what's in the movie.
Speaker 2: And apparently they made a much bigger point in the
Speaker 2: movie about this idea that they were behind and they
Speaker 2: were going to lose their contract. He said, no, they
Speaker 2: were doing their work, and ultimately when all of this
Speaker 2: went down, someone else was brought in to do the work.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the big dramatic reason or motivation that people
Speaker 2: have made it out to be. So I think a
Speaker 2: lot of what people are basing that theory on is
Speaker 2: the movie, not the actual experience.
Speaker 1: Well let's get to that movie. One thing I just
Speaker 1: want to say, if you're the kind of person that
Speaker 1: wants to look somebody in the eyes and see if
Speaker 1: you think they're telling the truth or not. There's a
Speaker 1: brand new documentary out called The Experience. There's full disclosure
Speaker 1: by a friend of the show, Dean Alioto, who directed
Speaker 1: it and produced it, and it covers both. It's a
Speaker 1: great refresher course on both the Betty and Barney Hill
Speaker 1: case but also the Travis Walton case. And Travis is
Speaker 1: interviewed on camera, nice clean, clear shot recent Travis tells
Speaker 1: his story. You can look him in the eyes in
Speaker 1: HD and you can assess what you think. Now. I've
Speaker 1: met Travis multiple times, I've met him at UFO conferences,
Speaker 1: I've seen him interviewed again. I'm going to go with
Speaker 1: I believe him. But now let's get to this movie.
Speaker 1: Because the movie. Let's also just put a pin in this.
Speaker 1: This is a really interesting handoff. Not often does a
Speaker 1: movie that represents an earlier abduction get made two weeks
Speaker 1: before a second abduction happens. And granted, this could all
Speaker 1: be coincidence, it could all be synchronicity, it could all
Speaker 1: be the phenomenon playing with our minds. So I'm not
Speaker 1: making excuses one way or the other. But i am
Speaker 1: pointing it out. This is the strongest case that you
Speaker 1: could imagine for people wanting I don't buy the outer
Speaker 1: limits giving Betty and Barney any idea of what that
Speaker 1: would not cause them to have their hypnotic regressions that way,
Speaker 1: But I could buy the Travis thing. Okay, now let's
Speaker 1: be clear, he's not reporting just a gray aliens take.
Speaker 1: He does report some gray aliens, but then he gets
Speaker 1: away and he ends up in a hangar where he
Speaker 1: basically sets what looks like Nordic's Yes. Right, So this
Speaker 1: isn't going to be an important thing. After this UFO
Speaker 1: incident airs a couple of quick things. A couple of
Speaker 1: years later, Close Encounters gets released, and remember that's got
Speaker 1: a great abduction in it of the kid buried Guilder.
Speaker 1: I think something like that, yes, yeah, and so that's
Speaker 1: a harrowing abduction. In nineteen eighty one, Missing Time by
Speaker 1: Bud Hopkins gets released as a book, which is a
Speaker 1: fascinating book. Travis Walton writes his own book in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy eight, the Walton Experience that gets published. Communion, as
Speaker 1: you mentioned, is published about ten years later. That's the
Speaker 1: one where Whitley Strieber puts the picture of the gray
Speaker 1: on the cover. That gets half a million people writing
Speaker 1: him saying I've seen that too. Communion gets released as
Speaker 1: a film in nineteen eighty nine. In nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: CBS has a limited series called Intruders that is based
Speaker 1: on another Bud Hopkins book. So my point is, abductions
Speaker 1: are out there in the zeitgeist at this point. People
Speaker 1: are talking about these two cases that might be real,
Speaker 1: but there's also movies going around at this point, and
Speaker 1: in fact, by the way, I wrote one of them,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about in previous things. Official Denial has
Speaker 1: abductions in it. That comes out in ninety three. The
Speaker 1: other thing, though, that comes out in ninety three is
Speaker 1: a movie called Fire in the Sky, and Fire in
Speaker 1: the Sky is the story of Travis Walton. Now you've
Speaker 1: seen the movie, how would you describe the film.
Speaker 2: It's a psychological thriller. It has certainly a science fiction
Speaker 2: component to it, but just in terms of the overall
Speaker 2: feel of it, it's a psychological thriller that's more like
Speaker 2: a small town crime drama.
Speaker 3: Because that's the bulk of the movie.
Speaker 2: And so it does have that section where Travis remembers
Speaker 2: what happened to him because he has a missing time
Speaker 2: circumstance as well, and then something triggers in all of
Speaker 2: his memories of what happened up on the ship during
Speaker 2: his abduction come back. But that's actually a very small,
Speaker 2: from a minute standpoint part of the film, so everything
Speaker 2: else feels very grounded in this small town murder investigation.
Speaker 1: James Garner is the sheriff that thinks they're all murdering live.
Speaker 1: It's a great cast, by the way, talk to nice,
Speaker 1: very nice. Robert Patrick plays really it becomes his story.
Speaker 1: He's the leader of the crew since Travis Walton is missing,
Speaker 1: played by dB Sweeney. dB Sweeney, Right, okay, however, Hollywood
Speaker 1: is about to come in and create another situation where
Speaker 1: you could say, chicken and egg. Why do we believe
Speaker 1: this instead of that? All right, you are so correct.
Speaker 1: Most of the film is just a good thriller. It's
Speaker 1: very nice, okay, But at some point dB Sweeney playing
Speaker 1: Travis Walton, remembers what happened to him. He's not regressed
Speaker 1: or anything, he just remembers it. And admittedly it's not
Speaker 1: the longest thing around, but it's about a five minute
Speaker 1: sequence all right on board the ship, and it is
Speaker 1: the most harrowing abduction I anybody that wants to see
Speaker 1: that just by itself, it is a great piece of filmmaking.
Speaker 1: It's so freaking scary. He wakes up and he's got
Speaker 1: this stuff around him. He's on this ship and it's dirty,
Speaker 1: and these evil, malicious gray are pulling him through the
Speaker 1: hallway and then they put him on a table and
Speaker 1: these doctors are just nasty ass They got they don't
Speaker 1: care what he's going through. They hold him down so
Speaker 1: that with some wrapping paper weirdness, and they've got just
Speaker 1: one of his eyes open. It's very similar to that
Speaker 1: Disclosure Day. The eye and Disclosure Day. It's frightening. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the problem. It didn't happen that way. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I know it didn't happen that way, and so is
Speaker 1: everybody now. But here's what really happened. We told you
Speaker 1: that Travis had a much different experience. He was not
Speaker 1: being dragged through dirty hallways. He was in a clean
Speaker 1: ship basically that had some Nordics and some other saucers
Speaker 1: in it, and he had an experience. But then that
Speaker 1: was that. Okay, Tracy Tormae is the screenwriter of it was.
Speaker 1: He was passionate about this, he wrote it. I knew
Speaker 1: Tracy for years. He's passed on a few years back.
Speaker 1: Tracy a passionate guy about this topic, etc. And he
Speaker 1: tried to get it right. He hung out with Travis.
Speaker 1: They spent a lot of time together. Tracy wrote a
Speaker 1: first draft that has the abduction sequence exactly as Travis
Speaker 1: remembered it. And guess what the executives said, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just I don't think that's going to work. That's not
Speaker 1: quite right. It's got to be scarier. And Tracy told me,
Speaker 1: and he's said this in other instances as well, that
Speaker 1: what happened is he was presented Brent with a choice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can refuse to do it and stand on your
Speaker 1: higher ground and morality, or will fire you and will
Speaker 1: fire you, or you can do it. And so Tracy
Speaker 1: wrote that harrowing scene. It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking,
Speaker 1: but it ain't what happened. Now. The problem I think
Speaker 1: that this reveals is there are so many movies that
Speaker 1: have been made about abductions over the years, and like
Speaker 1: I said at the beginning, we could go do an
Speaker 1: entire show and still not cover all of them. There's
Speaker 1: so many. There's found footage business that the other thing.
Speaker 1: But this is a great example of adaptation changes things
Speaker 1: when you're adapting real things, and it doesn't apply only
Speaker 1: to UFO movies. You have to adapt, you have to
Speaker 1: make a better movie out of it. The movie that
Speaker 1: I'm behind right now, the Last Battle of the World
Speaker 1: War two movie is based on a New York Times bestseller,
Speaker 1: but I've had to adapt it. And so when people
Speaker 1: see that movie in the theaters and say, but that's
Speaker 1: not exactly what happened, I'm going to say, read the
Speaker 1: book if you want to know exactly what happened. And
Speaker 1: I guess that was paramount I believe made it. That
Speaker 1: was their point of view. But it really shows because now,
Speaker 1: of course there's a whole generation of people who never
Speaker 1: heard about Travis Walton's statements, never been to a conference,
Speaker 1: never saw a documentary where he told his story, only
Speaker 1: saw fire in the sky, and they think that's what
Speaker 1: happened to him. And so my question is does that
Speaker 1: then impact other people about either faking or misremembering their
Speaker 1: own abduction experiences.
Speaker 2: I don't know what's your take, It goes back to
Speaker 2: this recurring question chicken or an egg. You think about
Speaker 2: how many people did see Fire in the Sky when
Speaker 2: it first came out or on cable since then. The
Speaker 2: movie does have a reputation, And if that's what people
Speaker 2: think an abduction experience is, then how many people have
Speaker 2: reported some version of that abduction experience in the wake
Speaker 2: of that film.
Speaker 3: Probably a lot.
Speaker 2: And yet I would argue too that there's a lot
Speaker 2: of people that have very different abduction experiences. That it's
Speaker 2: a little bit like people reporting near death experiences.
Speaker 3: They're all over the place.
Speaker 2: But I think most people's perception of abduction experiences are negative.
Speaker 2: They're scary, you're treated like an animal, you're violated. All
Speaker 2: of those things I think are the keywords that you
Speaker 2: would have for abductions. One thing that came up that
Speaker 2: I was fascinated by ask myself how many real life stories?
Speaker 2: And granted I'm maybe taking some liberties there, but Travis
Speaker 2: presented in his telling of the story, this is what happened,
Speaker 2: and as you said, lie detector tests were passed, So
Speaker 2: let's take it at face value and say it was
Speaker 2: a real life story. How many real life abduction stories
Speaker 2: after Fire in the Sky have been made into movies.
Speaker 2: I think you'll find the number is almost none, And
Speaker 2: so it raises this interesting question. The only other abduction
Speaker 2: sequence that I think most people could remember is, as
Speaker 2: you said, going back to Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
Speaker 2: in the context of that movie, when you're watching it
Speaker 2: and that little boy is being abducted and the mother
Speaker 2: is from her point of view, you're trying to stop
Speaker 2: these things from getting in and taking your child. It's harrowing,
Speaker 2: but at the end of the day, they're just benevolent
Speaker 2: space brothers and they bring the kid back.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So that's a scary abduction story, But in the bigger picture,
Speaker 2: it's okay.
Speaker 1: With a lot of abduction things made for TV and film,
Speaker 1: but they weren't based on true things. So, for example,
Speaker 1: you and I did a TV series Dark Skies based
Speaker 1: on abductions. There's abductions in my official denial, there's abductions
Speaker 1: on X Files, there's abductions in Taken, the series Spielberg did.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of abductions. There's a lot of movies
Speaker 1: about abductions as well. But again, my passion has been
Speaker 1: I believe if we are entering a disclosure world right now,
Speaker 1: that the hunger for people is going to be to
Speaker 1: see less made up stories, more stories pulled out of history,
Speaker 1: which is my point. I'm so passionate about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, And that's and I think a story
Speaker 2: that has truth to it. Like you said, you watch
Speaker 2: Travis tell his story, and for me, I just I
Speaker 2: take him at face value. Maybe all of the details
Speaker 2: have gotten fuzzy over the years, but I've also seen
Speaker 2: things where over the years he's kept pretty close to
Speaker 2: his story. Being an experiencer myself, I know that when
Speaker 2: you have these details that're burned into your memory because
Speaker 2: it's in fact, you wish that you could get rid
Speaker 2: of them sometimes and you can't. So the fact that
Speaker 2: was one of the last, if not the last true
Speaker 2: story being presented to the public as an abduction. There's
Speaker 2: been many abduction cases that have come and gone since then,
Speaker 2: some very interesting and compelling, but Hollywood has not found
Speaker 2: the interest to tell any of those stories. Now, to
Speaker 2: Hollywood's defense, Fire in the Sky was not a huge success.
Speaker 2: Maybe in fact, it was too harrowing for people. Maybe
Speaker 2: that's a story people don't want to tell or don't
Speaker 2: want to experience.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Before we wrap this up, some of you may be
Speaker 1: wondering whatever happened to that Betty and Barney Hill movie
Speaker 1: that dan Aykroyd called me about in that phone message
Speaker 1: we played at the beginning of this show. Okay, it's
Speaker 1: a long story. Here's the short, short version. To start with,
Speaker 1: there was a screenplay I wrote immediately after leaving my
Speaker 1: gig as CEO of the Television Academy. And you should
Speaker 1: know that my wife Jackie helps me run my production company,
Speaker 1: Stellar Production. So she and I took that screenplay out
Speaker 1: and we found a very high level management team that
Speaker 1: wanted to produce it, all of which sounded promising until
Speaker 1: about a year into that relationship when they offered me
Speaker 1: a trade off. One of their producing clients would take
Speaker 1: it on and they were going to start with a
Speaker 1: new writer who would completely rewrite my script and probably
Speaker 1: without much input from me at all. So Jackie and
Speaker 1: I parted company with that team, and we turned down
Speaker 1: their very generous offer to fire myself from my own project.
Speaker 1: Instead of giving up, though, Jackie and I went to
Speaker 1: New Hampshire. We went to the locations in the White
Speaker 1: Mountains where the Hills had been abducted. We visited Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney's home in Portsmouth, a lot of things like that,
Speaker 1: and that's when I wrote this three part investigative series
Speaker 1: on medium called The Lost Honeymoon of Betty and Barney Hill.
Speaker 1: And at that point we were armed with the piece
Speaker 1: of IP or intellectual property, and the fact that we
Speaker 1: actually controlled it seemed like a good thing. So we
Speaker 1: made another run for it. And in the middle of
Speaker 1: all this, Dan Ackroyd and I met. He read the script,
Speaker 1: he loved it. He even wrote me a letter of
Speaker 1: intent stating that he would be very pleased to play
Speaker 1: the part of doctor Benjamin Simon. After that, we had
Speaker 1: a brief flirtation with another manager, this time an Australian
Speaker 1: who had just relocated to the US. She wanted to
Speaker 1: represent the project, but only if we changed the script
Speaker 1: in dramatic ways that would fit the way she felt
Speaker 1: about alien abductions. So, in other words, she wasn't a
Speaker 1: producer who could make it, and she wasn't a studio
Speaker 1: or a network who could buy it. But before she
Speaker 1: could even try to set it up or sell it,
Speaker 1: we would have to spend about three months doing her
Speaker 1: voluminous notes that we didn't even agree with another three
Speaker 1: second pass there. Eventually we made a new alliance with
Speaker 1: a different producer who was a very cool guy who
Speaker 1: worked his heart out. His biggest success, though, was finding
Speaker 1: a very high profile TV producer and I mean very
Speaker 1: eye profile who wanted to do it, and a buyer,
Speaker 1: a major, huge studio who wanted to make it. This
Speaker 1: felt very good to us, but they had only one
Speaker 1: condition before making an offer in order to move ahead.
Speaker 1: They said that a writer would have to take over
Speaker 1: the project and be guaranteed sole credit for the script. Now,
Speaker 1: I have always supported representation in the entertainment business, so
Speaker 1: I support people having access, but this just seemed like
Speaker 1: the wrong creative direction for a project about something as
Speaker 1: controversial as alien abduction. We had to pass on that.
Speaker 1: Jackie and I then cross developed the project from the
Speaker 1: feature version to also be a ten part limited series
Speaker 1: so that we had both our bases covered film and TV.
Speaker 1: And then we went on and attached new agents and
Speaker 1: managers and a director and a new very experienced producer
Speaker 1: to this sales effort. Things were looking good, and then
Speaker 1: because the universe apparently is a very strange place with
Speaker 1: a very strange sense of Humor. Two other high profile
Speaker 1: Betty and Barney Hill projects surfaced in the Hollywood trades,
Speaker 1: one right after the other. Now I'm not going to
Speaker 1: name these other projects, and I haven't read their scripts,
Speaker 1: but from what was written about them, it sounded like
Speaker 1: the way that they saw the Betty and Barney Hill
Speaker 1: story was very different than our own take. Those projects
Speaker 1: appeared to be skeptical, and as time has passed, I
Speaker 1: should point out nobody's made a Betty and Barney Hill
Speaker 1: movie yet, includes us, but also any other projects. So
Speaker 1: Jackie and I haven't given up, and in fact, we
Speaker 1: have new energy because our vision of the story is
Speaker 1: that Betty and Barney Hill were abducted period. We don't
Speaker 1: think they were victims of a psychological fugue state where
Speaker 1: they got their dreams confused during hypnosis. In fact, I
Speaker 1: would say, listen to those hypnosis tapes that you can
Speaker 1: find on the Internet and in documentaries, and they're enough
Speaker 1: for us that happened. And also, certainly Steven Spielberg's disclosure
Speaker 1: Day has put alien abduction back into the mainstream conversation.
Speaker 1: So I think there is room for a good, based
Speaker 1: on truth alien abduction story. So if Jackie and I
Speaker 1: are lucky enough to win the race to production. I
Speaker 1: would tell our new partners that there's one call I
Speaker 1: wanted to make right away, and it would be to
Speaker 1: Dan Ackroyd. I would want to tell him, Hey, Dan,
Speaker 1: I'm sending you the latest script and we want you
Speaker 1: to play the part of doctor Benjamin Simon. Brent. That's
Speaker 1: my Hollywood story. In brief back to.
Speaker 2: You, I think I would make the exact same creative
Speaker 2: choice that you've made. I think just being definitive, taking
Speaker 2: a stance is a completely legitimate way to tell a story. Interestingly,
Speaker 2: my belief in both of these cases comes from my
Speaker 2: own personal experience, and I think you look at the
Speaker 2: commonalities between their cases and mine. I told this on
Speaker 2: an earlier episode, but I had my own missing time gap,
Speaker 2: and it came in the wake of when John Harrington
Speaker 2: disclosed to me. And what's really fascinating about it is
Speaker 2: that I didn't realize I had a missing time gap
Speaker 2: until only a couple of years ago. And if you remember,
Speaker 2: the John Harrington story happened in nineteen eighty one, and
Speaker 2: when we were prepping for this podcast, someone said, what's
Speaker 2: it about? And I told them and I gave them
Speaker 2: a little snapshot of the John Harrington story, and at
Speaker 2: the end of it, they asked me question no one
Speaker 2: had ever asked before, which was, so, how was the
Speaker 2: rest of your trip in DC?
Speaker 3: Nothing? Zero?
Speaker 2: I don't remember one thing. I remember the night that
Speaker 2: I laid in bed after I was disclosed to and
Speaker 2: then I remember being home and going on a graduation
Speaker 2: trip that summer with vivid details, and I asked my family,
Speaker 2: and apparently we never really talked about it. Everything that
Speaker 2: I know about the trip I heard through my mom,
Speaker 2: through John's wife talking about all the great things that
Speaker 2: we did, and I just took it at face value.
Speaker 2: And now I'm as we've gone back and looked at
Speaker 2: the Betty and Barney Hill case, I'm actually sitting here
Speaker 2: thinking maybe I need to do a hypnotic regression, something
Speaker 2: that I never would have considered, to see if I
Speaker 2: can unearth that week or ten days or whatever it
Speaker 2: was that I spent in DC, and the idea and
Speaker 2: the frustration and the fact that I know it's possible
Speaker 2: to have a missing time gap when something traumatic happens
Speaker 2: to you. That's where I tend to look at both
Speaker 2: of these cases and say, something happened to them. People
Speaker 2: don't experience that level of trauma just out of their
Speaker 2: sheer imagination. Right, that would imply that I have a
Speaker 2: really scary dream and I'm traumatized to the point of
Speaker 2: not being able to work for months. Really, I've never
Speaker 2: really heard that happening before. So if it's just a
Speaker 2: product of my mind, I don't think it's that that
Speaker 2: severe that it would cause such disruption in people's lives.
Speaker 2: And both these cases, people's lives were greatly disrupted, turned
Speaker 2: upside down, lots of negative attention. And to go through
Speaker 2: that just because you invented it, I just don't buy it.
Speaker 1: And it either, although it raises a question about your
Speaker 1: missing time, which by the way, we should note would
Speaker 1: be longer than Travis Walton's five days. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: time though where you felt it and have on Earth.
Speaker 1: You weren't abducted into no craft. You just lost memory,
Speaker 1: which is a whole different kind of missing time too.
Speaker 1: It's almost like, I don't know, maybe MK ultra got
Speaker 1: hold of you and wiped your memory. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think that with both with the Betty and Barney
Speaker 2: Hill case, that if you look at it exclusively there
Speaker 2: was based on the hypnotic regression, it seemed that the
Speaker 2: aliens did not want them to remember, right, That was
Speaker 2: actually discussed. But the idea being is that something that's
Speaker 2: so traumatic happens to you, your brain just closes it off.
Speaker 2: It doesn't allow you to remember it. That's what seemed
Speaker 2: like what happened to Travis Walton when he came back.
Speaker 2: He didn't remember what happened until something spurred his memory
Speaker 2: and all of those the remembrances came flooding back into
Speaker 2: his mind. That's what I'm talking about is, yes, I
Speaker 2: was not abducted, but something so traumatic happened to me
Speaker 2: that I shut down. My brain just stopped remembering for
Speaker 2: a period of time for no reason whatsoever. And unlike
Speaker 2: both of these stories where eventually they got their memories back,
Speaker 2: I still.
Speaker 3: Don't have those memories back.
Speaker 2: That's why I'm saying now I have to actually consider
Speaker 2: what Betty and Barney did was go and have hypnotic
Speaker 2: regression and see if I can exhume any of that
Speaker 2: time that I spent in DC.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's anomalous. I like your conclusion that because you
Speaker 1: are an experiencer, you are certainly more open to believing
Speaker 1: the stories of an experiencer. I'm going to put a
Speaker 1: slightly different twist on it, because that's all yours, and
Speaker 1: I can't comment on that because I'm not an experiencer.
Speaker 1: I've experienced the cover up, I have not experienced the
Speaker 1: phenomenia in that respect. Okay, here's the thing we've discussed,
Speaker 1: how Fire in the Sky presents an abduction thing that
Speaker 1: is harrowing, specific, and horrific. Okay, that happened, millions of
Speaker 1: people have seen it. However, people continually report abductions and
Speaker 1: experiences right now, and to the best of my knowledge,
Speaker 1: almost none of them, almost none of them report a
Speaker 1: Travis Walton fire in the Sky kind of situation. They
Speaker 1: report something else, but they don't report being dragged through
Speaker 1: dirty spaceships and wrapped in alien saran wrap. They do
Speaker 1: not report that, to the best of my knowledge. And
Speaker 1: I think it does go back to the whole serial
Speaker 1: killer thing. Just because you've seen something doesn't make you
Speaker 1: adapt and adopt if you will, that into your psyche
Speaker 1: and then spew it back out in harrowing hypnotic sessions.
Speaker 1: That's not the way things seem to have worked at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, Betty and Barney Hill were
Speaker 1: the first people to be abducted. It really happened to them.
Speaker 1: That's why the name of my film is Missing Time.
Speaker 1: That's why I want to tell their story, and because
Speaker 1: I believe it's true. But I also believe Travis Walton
Speaker 1: is telling the truth. And I will just say a
Speaker 1: kind word about Tracy Tormey, who's not with us any longer.
Speaker 1: But this man was thorough. He understood the Travis Walton case.
Speaker 1: He talked to everybody, he spent years of his life
Speaker 1: looking into it. And Tracy was not a guy that
Speaker 1: believed everything. You could tell Tracy a story and Tracy
Speaker 1: would take me aside and go, I don't think you
Speaker 1: can believe that because blah blah blah. He would investigate things.
Speaker 1: He investigated Travis Walton. He believed him. And if my
Speaker 1: buddy Tracy believed him, I believe him. So I think
Speaker 1: these are two great cases. And if you're studying the
Speaker 1: experiencer situation today, they are the trailhead that's where we
Speaker 1: really get this thing going. And if they happened, Brent,
Speaker 1: you have to ask yourself, what does that mean. If
Speaker 1: they were the first when things were just kicking off.
Speaker 1: Where are we now? It's been sixty five years since
Speaker 1: Betty and Barney whoever was taking people and appears to
Speaker 1: still be doing it to a certain extent. What are
Speaker 1: they up to? Shouldn't they be done by now? What
Speaker 1: are they doing?
Speaker 2: Those are great questions you're asking, and I can only
Speaker 2: hope that's going to be part of this disclosure we've
Speaker 2: been promised by the administration.
Speaker 1: All Right, look, let's say good night, but also tip
Speaker 1: of the hat to Dan Ackroyd. Dan, thank you for
Speaker 1: your good graciousness and letting us play the phone message
Speaker 1: because it gives everybody a smile on their face and
Speaker 1: we appreciate everything that you have done to move this
Speaker 1: story forward. So thank you, dan Ackroyd.
Speaker 3: Yes, thank you Dan. All Right, Watch this, guys, everybody.
Speaker 1: Sound, Light and Frequency is an iHeart podcast produced by
Speaker 1: Stellar Productions. It's executive produced by Nick Johnson and for
Speaker 1: Stellar Jackie's Abel. Our show's music was written by Anna
Speaker 1: Stumf and Hamilton Life eight Houser and your hosts and
Speaker 1: executive producers are Bryce Able. That's me and Brent Friedman.
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