Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild Some Aaron Manky, go Tellahu talk to
Speaker 1: you tonight? Five General Food. Hello, here's your host Dall
Speaker 1: to tell the crows call you? Why do one of
Speaker 1: these beings? Right now? Let's meet our first team of challenge.
Speaker 1: What is your name? Please? My name is Bonnie Hill.
Speaker 1: My name is Barney Hill. My name is Bonnie Hill.
Speaker 1: Let's start the questioning with Arson B and Arson Number two?
Speaker 1: How tall were these humanoid creatures? Well? They were short
Speaker 1: five nine or five ten at the most. Number three?
Speaker 1: Did they speak English? Not in an actual speaking type voice?
Speaker 1: It was something like thought transferred? Number one? What physical
Speaker 1: symptoms did you later? Notice? What's what's is tom? Number one?
Speaker 1: Where you were alert when you were in the ship
Speaker 1: and awake? Uh? More like in a sim nabilistic states.
Speaker 1: Number two when they examined you, did they stick needles
Speaker 1: in you? Not needles? Needle? Remember when did they stick
Speaker 1: a needle in Betty too? Yes, they stuck a needle
Speaker 1: in Betty? Were they like our needles? Number one? I
Speaker 1: didn't say the needle? Were they the same build as us?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, how did they like have pointy
Speaker 1: heads or something. No, they had large cranium and the
Speaker 1: chin was very small, wouldn't you know it? That's all
Speaker 1: the time we had, which we did have more fascinating story.
Speaker 1: So mark a ballace, if you will please, without any consultation,
Speaker 1: and of course without changing once you have marked Tom.
Speaker 1: For whom did you vote? I voted for number one,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't tell anything from the stories that they
Speaker 1: each told. But he looked like the kind of man
Speaker 1: who would have binoculars handy in his car, Beggy Cat.
Speaker 1: I voted for number one because they had big kids
Speaker 1: in me seating chins and wouldn't you know it's arsen
Speaker 1: I think that there's two great liars up there. And
Speaker 1: I had no way of judging except that the whole
Speaker 1: thing took place around New England. And when I asked
Speaker 1: Number one about the warts, he said watch they had watched.
Speaker 1: And I'm from New England too, and I noticed watches, watches,
Speaker 1: watch votes are all in mind's made up, as you heard,
Speaker 1: and all let's find out which one of these three
Speaker 1: gentlemen in truth is Barney Hill. Well, the real Barney Hill,
Speaker 1: please stand up on this episode of To Tell the Truth,
Speaker 1: the panelists were able to identify number one as the
Speaker 1: real Barney Hill, and both here and elsewhere, he was
Speaker 1: telling the truth as he saw it, but some of
Speaker 1: this truth involved memories that were revealed during his hypnosis
Speaker 1: sessions with Dr Benjamin Simon. This brings up an important
Speaker 1: question in evaluating the Hills experience. How much can you
Speaker 1: rely on memories recovered through hypnotic regression? Simply put, is
Speaker 1: hypnosis a reliable tool for bringing back memories? I'm Toby
Speaker 1: Ball and this is Strange Arrivals Episode five regressed Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney underwent their hypnosis treatment with Dr Benjamin Simon.
Speaker 1: We now have a much better understanding of how hypnosis works.
Speaker 1: Hosted the Skeptic Podcast Bryan Dunning. So this is actually
Speaker 1: what originally got me into this because I was working
Speaker 1: on another subject at the time, which was the whole
Speaker 1: topic of hypnotic regression in general. And these recovered memories
Speaker 1: and the Betty Varney Hill story is kind of a
Speaker 1: classic example of what we think of as these recovered
Speaker 1: memories under hypnosis. It's now no longer the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: it's now the two thousand teens, and we now have
Speaker 1: very solid evidence that there is no such thing as
Speaker 1: hypnotic regression or recovered repressed memories. That's just simply not
Speaker 1: a part of psychology. That body of evidence is extraordinarily robust.
Speaker 1: We see things like a court cases being overturned and
Speaker 1: stuff based on kind of the modern science of hypnosis
Speaker 1: and psychology. Hypnotic regression came to the public attention in
Speaker 1: the nine teen eighties and nineties. At this time, some
Speaker 1: psychiatric professionals were working with patients, often children, to quote
Speaker 1: unquote recover memories of sexual abuse. One outcome of this
Speaker 1: movement was a rash of claims that sexual abuse rituals
Speaker 1: were being organized by groups of Satanists. The so called
Speaker 1: Satanic panic was eventually fully discredited and hypnotic regression along
Speaker 1: with it. Author freelance writer and skeptical investigator Robert Schaffer,
Speaker 1: and this whole business about recovered memories. If you recall
Speaker 1: back in the late eighties and early nineties, it was
Speaker 1: a big thing to hypnotize people that allegedly repressed memories
Speaker 1: of sexual abuse, usually or some other trauma, but for
Speaker 1: the most party, it was sexual abuse, and it was
Speaker 1: there was just a huge controversy over this, so many people,
Speaker 1: you know, we're claiming to have recovered such memories, either
Speaker 1: with or without hypnosis. And when somebody you know, claimed
Speaker 1: to recover this, they had, you know, there were support groups.
Speaker 1: It was a big thing. Innocent people got accused of
Speaker 1: terrible crimes based only on so called recovered memories, and
Speaker 1: the whole thing. Again, it's a very sad chapter. It's
Speaker 1: a very embarrassing chapter. Nobody in serious academia today takes
Speaker 1: any of this, you know, recovered memories as as anything
Speaker 1: more than likely a fantasy. It's it's possible that maybe
Speaker 1: some of it might be true, or somebody remembers something,
Speaker 1: but again there's just no way to tell. I don't
Speaker 1: do hypnosis with people, but I have studied the literature
Speaker 1: on hypnotically refreshed memories. This is Elizabeth Loftis. I am
Speaker 1: a professor at the University of California the Irvine, the
Speaker 1: Irvine Campus. She's also one of the foremost experts on
Speaker 1: human memory. One of the things that you can say
Speaker 1: about hypnosis it it might be helpful to somebody who
Speaker 1: wants to try to use it to lose weight or
Speaker 1: stop smoking or be less anxious, But when it comes
Speaker 1: to using hypnosis to try to to dig up allegedly
Speaker 1: buried trauma memories. That's when you've got to be really,
Speaker 1: really careful, because under the influence of hypnosis, especially if
Speaker 1: you're highly hypnotize herbal you are even more susceptible to
Speaker 1: contamination and distortion. And then when you produce something in
Speaker 1: this hypnotic state, you have a tendency to believe, well,
Speaker 1: if I thought about it under hypnosis, it must have
Speaker 1: really happened to you become even more confident about it,
Speaker 1: whether it's true or not. Did you catch the part
Speaker 1: where Dr Loftis said that people who are easily hypnotized
Speaker 1: are also highly suggestible. In nineties sixty four, when Dr
Speaker 1: Simon conducted his sessions with the Hills, this connection was unknown.
Speaker 1: In an undated document in the University of New Hampshire
Speaker 1: Special Archives titled Hypnosis Betty basically braggs about how hypnotizable
Speaker 1: she and Barney were. She writes at the end of
Speaker 1: the sessions, Dr Simon said that both of us were
Speaker 1: very good subjects who were able to reach a very
Speaker 1: deep trance quickly and easily. The depth of our trances
Speaker 1: was unusual, a level where only one person out of
Speaker 1: millions might be able to reach the fact that both
Speaker 1: of us were able to do this was outstanding that
Speaker 1: we were two out of millions with the abilities to
Speaker 1: do this. Even if we allow for some hyperbole, we
Speaker 1: have it from Betty that Dr Simon considered them good subjects.
Speaker 1: We now know this would also make them highly suggestible.
Speaker 1: This is not to say that Dr Simon planted memories
Speaker 1: during these hypnosi successions. He was an experienced and a
Speaker 1: highly respected psychiatrist, but it does raise the possibility that
Speaker 1: they weren't necessarily remembering actual events. Do you remember in
Speaker 1: the first episode we heard some audio from one of
Speaker 1: Barney's hypnos secessions. What struck me was how emotional Barney
Speaker 1: became when he described seeing the aliens looking at him
Speaker 1: from the windows of the UFO. I'm thinking my head away,
Speaker 1: God give all right, yes, God gotta get away. Oh oh, alright,
Speaker 1: I'm getting way. Would someone under hypnosis react with such
Speaker 1: strong emotion to something that never actually happened? Just at
Speaker 1: an intuitive level, it seems as though a false memory
Speaker 1: wouldn't create that kind of dramatic fear response. Again, Elizabeth
Speaker 1: loftus one of the questions that researchers have wondered about
Speaker 1: is whether people would be emotional about false memories the
Speaker 1: way they can sometimes be emotional about true memories. And
Speaker 1: the psychologist psychology professor Richard McNally has actually studied the
Speaker 1: emotional reactions of people who believe they were abducted by aliens.
Speaker 1: And what he has found and shown in a beautiful
Speaker 1: study is that when people are thinking about their abduction experiences,
Speaker 1: they are highly emotional. You measure their heart rate or
Speaker 1: their their skin resistance or those physiological measures. They are
Speaker 1: as aroused and upset when they think about these experiences
Speaker 1: as other people are when they're thinking about truly traumatic
Speaker 1: experiences that have happened to them. And so mcnali concludes,
Speaker 1: and I would concur based on some work that I've done,
Speaker 1: that emotional reaction is certainly no guarantee of authenticity, that
Speaker 1: people can be very emotional about false memories. Our current
Speaker 1: understanding of hypnosis and recovered memories is far more skeptical
Speaker 1: than it was in We know now that hypnosis is
Speaker 1: not a tool by which people can recall the exact
Speaker 1: details of past events. We also know that so called
Speaker 1: repressed memories are not reliable part of this has to
Speaker 1: do with how hypnosis works, but it also has to
Speaker 1: do with how memory itself is constructed and then retrieved.
Speaker 1: We like to say that memory doesn't work like a
Speaker 1: recording device, like a video recorder. You don't just red
Speaker 1: or did and play it back. The process is much
Speaker 1: more complex and actually when we are remembering, we're essentially
Speaker 1: constructing or reconstructing the experience, and that means we are
Speaker 1: taking bits and pieces of information, sometimes acquired at different
Speaker 1: times and places, and bringing it together to construct what
Speaker 1: what feels like a memory, because that's what it feels like,
Speaker 1: right that you are remembering things as they actually happened,
Speaker 1: But you aren't. Your memories are the product of a
Speaker 1: number of factors, which include the reality of what happened,
Speaker 1: but other things as well, memories of far more or
Speaker 1: I should say, remembering is a far more active process.
Speaker 1: This is Dr Mark Kenn, principal lecturer at the University
Speaker 1: of New Hampshire, among others. He's had a course on
Speaker 1: paranormal and other extraordinary beliefs. Every time you're telling that story,
Speaker 1: as you're saying, if you've told it a hundred times,
Speaker 1: the hundredth time you're telling it. You're remembering the ninety
Speaker 1: nine time you told it. In the ninety time, you're
Speaker 1: remembering the time you told it. And so we have
Speaker 1: a several biases in there. We we have a bias
Speaker 1: that makes us more the focus of the story, so
Speaker 1: the things that happened to us are more prominent. We
Speaker 1: have a bias that puts the memories in line with
Speaker 1: what we believe about ourselves now. So even if we
Speaker 1: have changed tremendously since that time, that story is going
Speaker 1: to fit who we are now. There's a number of
Speaker 1: other ones that stories tend to, as you say, streamline
Speaker 1: and fit a storyline better than the fragmented way that
Speaker 1: we might remember it initially. But there's a lot of time.
Speaker 1: I mean, people remember things that they can't possibly have remembered.
Speaker 1: They remember things that in fact did not happen. My
Speaker 1: brother remembered stories about being born. He didn't. He remembered
Speaker 1: people telling him stories about that. Trying often we will,
Speaker 1: we will remember something as having happened to us when well, wait, no,
Speaker 1: we heard about that from somebody else. It's just that
Speaker 1: we imagined it so vividly that it became part of
Speaker 1: our own autobiographical memory. People will remember something happened, and
Speaker 1: in fact it was a TV show. The function of
Speaker 1: memory is to be able to have stuff that happened
Speaker 1: at time one help us at time too. There's absolutely
Speaker 1: nothing about that that means it has to be accurate.
Speaker 1: And in fact, if biases are going to help us
Speaker 1: learn from the stuff that happened back then, to condense it,
Speaker 1: to make it simple so that we can react more quickly,
Speaker 1: then they're very useful, uh, to be able to say, oh,
Speaker 1: instead of there's all this this, this weirdness and random
Speaker 1: stuff that's happening back there, so I don't quite know
Speaker 1: how to make use of it. Nope, there's a story
Speaker 1: in it. Boom, I can make use of it now.
Speaker 1: Strange arrivals will return in a moment. It's a difficult
Speaker 1: thing to contemplate that memories that seem so real, so vivid,
Speaker 1: are not necessarily what happened. There are mental recreations that
Speaker 1: change over time due to a number of factors, new
Speaker 1: perceptions about oneself, incorrect details that found their way into
Speaker 1: the last time you told the story, and the instinct
Speaker 1: to create a narrative out of the fragments from which
Speaker 1: memories created. Memories can be vivid, but that does not
Speaker 1: equate to being accurate. And there's another thing. Memories can
Speaker 1: be influenced, altered, or even made up by external sources
Speaker 1: after the fact. That is, memory is not only fairly unreliable,
Speaker 1: but it is also easily corrupted. What we have shown
Speaker 1: is out there in the real world, well, we're exposed
Speaker 1: to misinformation. I don't know you could even say frequently.
Speaker 1: We get misinformation when we talk to other people, or
Speaker 1: when we overhear other witnesses being interviewed, or what when
Speaker 1: we're asked a suggestive or leading questions by somebody who's
Speaker 1: interrogating us. When we are exupposed to media coverage about
Speaker 1: some event that we might have experienced. All of these
Speaker 1: provide an opportunity for new information to become available to
Speaker 1: a witness and to potentially produce a contamination of distortion
Speaker 1: in the witnesses memory. I asked Dr loftis how malleable
Speaker 1: people's memories really are. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: and my collaborators have done is to expose people two events,
Speaker 1: maybe a simulated crime or accident, and then we feed
Speaker 1: them some misinformation about the event, and we look to
Speaker 1: see the extent at which they will accept this misinformation
Speaker 1: and it will alter or transform their memory. And so
Speaker 1: we have found that you can show people an accident,
Speaker 1: for example, where a car goes to a yield sign,
Speaker 1: and you can feed the misinformation that it was a
Speaker 1: stop sign, and many people will claim that what they
Speaker 1: actually saw was the stop sign. They fall for the
Speaker 1: misinformation and it in essence becomes their memory. That's one
Speaker 1: type of study that we have done showing that it's
Speaker 1: pretty easy to change people's memories for the details of
Speaker 1: events that they actually did experience. Details can be altered,
Speaker 1: I asked Dr loftis entirely new details could be created
Speaker 1: from suggestion? Can you lead someone to believe in something
Speaker 1: that wasn't there or didn't happen? You can add objects
Speaker 1: to memory. We've added objects to the memories of soldiers
Speaker 1: who were being interrogated. We made them believe they saw
Speaker 1: telephones or weapons in interrogation rooms when they didn't exist.
Speaker 1: All through suggestive supplying of new information after some event
Speaker 1: is over keep this concept in mind that through suggestive
Speaker 1: supplying of new information, you can make people believe that
Speaker 1: they are remembering things that weren't there or didn't happen.
Speaker 1: I talked to al Jundra Rojas, the host of Open
Speaker 1: minds UFO Radio. He also writes about UFOs and the paranormal.
Speaker 1: You know my attempt, and luckily, I think making my
Speaker 1: credits will agree I'm pretty good at it. Is that
Speaker 1: I try to take a journalistic approach, so I try
Speaker 1: to cover all sides and give all the facts available
Speaker 1: so people have more of an unbiased kind of overview
Speaker 1: of the phenomena or whatever it is that topic that
Speaker 1: I'm covering in this arena. Here he talks about Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney and the stories they told while under hypnosis.
Speaker 1: You know, these two individuals under hypnosis and by you know,
Speaker 1: I believe a credible hypnotist who wasn't really you know,
Speaker 1: trying to guide them. They had very similar stories, even
Speaker 1: though they were regressed separately. I think that's the most
Speaker 1: compelling piece as far as evidence goes. This is the
Speaker 1: other mystery about the Hills hypnosis sessions. If you are
Speaker 1: a skeptic, how do you account for Betty and Barney
Speaker 1: separately telling essentially the same story. Dr Simon went so
Speaker 1: far as to have them forget what they disclosed so
Speaker 1: they could not talk to each other about them between
Speaker 1: the weekly sessions. So we put, if the abduction didn't happen,
Speaker 1: how could their memories of it be so similar. This
Speaker 1: is Robert Schaeffer, followed by Brian Dunning. The whole idea
Speaker 1: of you know, this alien contact and being stopped and
Speaker 1: so on, that idea was not there originally. That's in
Speaker 1: the hypnosis part of the story. What happened was they
Speaker 1: met with the number, talked with a number of upologists.
Speaker 1: They loved to tell the story. Betty loved to tell
Speaker 1: the story to people who wanted to listen to her
Speaker 1: about what she saw. And at that point it was
Speaker 1: a UFO sighting. It wasn't an abduction or or or
Speaker 1: an alien encounter. And it was only after then she
Speaker 1: started to have these dreams in her dream she was abducted.
Speaker 1: She did meet up with aliens, and she told her
Speaker 1: dreams to people, and then somebody suggested, well, maybe it
Speaker 1: wasn't a dream, maybe it really happened. And so then
Speaker 1: when later when they went to doctor Simon, and really
Speaker 1: the reason that both of them went to see Dr
Speaker 1: Simon was they were having especially Barney was was very nervous.
Speaker 1: He was having trouble sleeping, he was having ulcers. Frankly,
Speaker 1: he was in quite a state, and so then Dr
Speaker 1: Simon hypnotized both of them. I think the most significant
Speaker 1: point about it is that this hypnotic regression didn't happen
Speaker 1: for almost two and a half years after the supposed event,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people don't realize that. A lot
Speaker 1: of people think, oh, they went in the next day
Speaker 1: and had their hypnosis and told the same story in
Speaker 1: these separate rooms where they hadn't had time to corroborate
Speaker 1: and get their stories straight. That's not the case at all.
Speaker 1: So for more than two years, Betty had been writing
Speaker 1: down this version of her story in tremendous detail, writing
Speaker 1: and rewriting and editing it, telling it to Barney over
Speaker 1: and over and over again. Is it any surprised that
Speaker 1: their stories were similar once they went under hypnosis. Once
Speaker 1: you get to that part of it and you see,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, there goes the whole hypnos just part
Speaker 1: of the story. Just there's nothing interesting or surprising about
Speaker 1: it at all. Anymore, the question becomes did Betty tell
Speaker 1: Barney about her dreams? If so, this would explain why
Speaker 1: their stories were essentially two perspectives on the same narrative.
Speaker 1: This came up during the March hypnosis session when Dr
Speaker 1: Simon questioned Barney about the basis for his tale of
Speaker 1: alien abduction. This is from the transcript of that session
Speaker 1: as read by actors. Somebody told you about this before
Speaker 1: that in some way? Who was that? Betty? My wife? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And how did she tell you about it? She would
Speaker 1: say that she had a dream, and that a dream
Speaker 1: was that she had been taken aboard a UFO, and
Speaker 1: that I was also in a dream, I was taken
Speaker 1: a boat. Yeah, but you told me that she didn't
Speaker 1: speak to you about this. How did she tell you this?
Speaker 1: She would tell me this from usually when someone would
Speaker 1: ask us about our sighting of a UFO, and then
Speaker 1: she would mention this, and I just told her it
Speaker 1: was a dream and nothing to get alarmed about. Did
Speaker 1: she tell you all of the details? Can you tell
Speaker 1: me all of the details of what happened to her?
Speaker 1: She would tell me a great many of the details
Speaker 1: of her dreams, but she was not certain to the
Speaker 1: location where we had stopped. And she would tell me
Speaker 1: she had gone into this UFO and had talked with
Speaker 1: the people there on board and she was told she
Speaker 1: would forget in her dreams, she would forget about this,
Speaker 1: and she said she would tell me that she was
Speaker 1: determined that she would not forget. That she told these
Speaker 1: people in this UFO that she would not forget. And
Speaker 1: this is the way she would tell me of her dreams.
Speaker 1: And I told her they were only dreams, and that
Speaker 1: I can't believe whatever these dreams are that she is having,
Speaker 1: only that she is having nightmares if they are frightening,
Speaker 1: and she said, no, they are not frightening. It's just
Speaker 1: that she feels that somehow there is some connection between
Speaker 1: her dreams, because she never dreamed of UFOs before. And
Speaker 1: she would tell me that they had stuck something in
Speaker 1: her navel, causing great pain, and that just the wave
Speaker 1: of the hand, this pain disappeared. And she was not
Speaker 1: telling this to me, but I would be present while
Speaker 1: she was telling it to friends of ours, or to
Speaker 1: Walter Webb. Whenever we would see him, he would ask
Speaker 1: us about the UFO sighting that we had had. In
Speaker 1: then I would hear of dreams. But never did she
Speaker 1: tell this actually to me. Dr Simon himself endorsed the
Speaker 1: theory that Barney had been influenced by Betty's dreams, and
Speaker 1: that those dreams were the basis for both of their
Speaker 1: quote unquote memories recovered through hypnosis. And in October letter
Speaker 1: to the prominent UFO researcher Philip Class, Dr Simon writes
Speaker 1: the UFO was a citing the abduction did not take place,
Speaker 1: but was a reproduction of Betty's dream which occurred right
Speaker 1: after the sighting. This was her expression of anxiety. Is
Speaker 1: contrasted to Barney's more psychosomatic one. Of course, Dr Simon's
Speaker 1: opinion is just that an opinion. It is an evidence,
Speaker 1: and just as our understanding of memory and hypnosis has changed,
Speaker 1: the concept of alien abduction was unknown at the time.
Speaker 1: UFO researcher and physicist Stanton Friedman believes that it was
Speaker 1: the unprecedented nature of the Hills experience that led Dr
Speaker 1: Simon to discount it. There's no question that Dr Simon
Speaker 1: was skeptical of the notion of alien visitors. Everybody was.
Speaker 1: You know, we're talking in the sixties, long before we
Speaker 1: had gone in the moon, long before we operated nuclear
Speaker 1: rocket engines, for example. On the ground, there wasn't a
Speaker 1: body of data which would lead most people to think
Speaker 1: that this kind of thing could happen. That may be true,
Speaker 1: but what we know about regression hypnosis makes Benny and
Speaker 1: Barney's abduction seem unlikely. Absent other evidence, the hypnotically recalled
Speaker 1: stories really don't prove anything, and we've already seen how
Speaker 1: the alien symbols and the star map have at best
Speaker 1: questionable value as proof. We'll talk about the physical evidence
Speaker 1: torn dress, scuff shoes, and so on in a later episode.
Speaker 1: Even in Dr Simon realized that they might very well
Speaker 1: be talking about Betty dreams and not a real event.
Speaker 1: Where did the line blur between reality and nightmare? Next
Speaker 1: time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey.
Speaker 1: This episode was written and hosted by Toby Bowl and
Speaker 1: produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thane, with executive producers
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was
Speaker 1: portrayed by Gina Rickikey. Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to the Milns Special Collections and Archives at
Speaker 1: the University of New Hampshire. John Horrigan w y A. M.
Speaker 1: In Norwich, Connecticut, John White and David O'Leary, the executive
Speaker 1: producer of the History Channel's dramatic series Project blue Book.
Speaker 1: Learn more about the show over at grimm and mil
Speaker 1: dot com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.