Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankie. I'm Dudley Dudley. I
Speaker 1: live in Durham, Hampshire, and many years ago I lived
Speaker 1: in Greenland, New Hampshire, which is just outside of Portsmouth
Speaker 1: and Exeter. While I was living there with my husband
Speaker 1: and children, we joined a group called Seacoast Council on
Speaker 1: Religion and Race. It was in the early sixties and
Speaker 1: among the other people who were members of that group
Speaker 1: there was a couple Partey in Betty Hill. I got
Speaker 1: to know them rather well and invited them to dinner
Speaker 1: one night. And after dinner we were sitting in the
Speaker 1: living room just talking generalities, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: out of absolutely nowhere, Barney started to tell the story
Speaker 1: of something that had happened to them, oh maybe six
Speaker 1: months or eight months earlier. It was the story of
Speaker 1: their abduction by aliens. It was jaw dropping. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was nothing that I had any reason to believe
Speaker 1: apart from there saying it. But I mean there's been
Speaker 1: no clues whatsoever. Nobody had whispered about. You know, Barney
Speaker 1: and Betty had this adventure. They just started to talk,
Speaker 1: and it was compelling. They talked about driving in their
Speaker 1: car and coming down the highway and seeing lights flashing.
Speaker 1: Somehow the lights urged them to pull over from there.
Speaker 1: In their telling of the story, it developed into their
Speaker 1: being taken out of the car and into I guess
Speaker 1: the spaceship and physically examined. Betty sort of laughed about it,
Speaker 1: saying that she figured later that they went back up
Speaker 1: into the heavens of wherever from whence they had come,
Speaker 1: And we're reporting to their boss of the creatures on
Speaker 1: Earth that the male of the species is black, the
Speaker 1: female is white, and the offspring is this little sauce
Speaker 1: and shaped brown what what we know as a dog.
Speaker 1: In their separate hypnosis sessions, Betty and Barney Hill told
Speaker 1: remarkably similar stories about being abducted and brought aboard an
Speaker 1: alien spacecraft. Last episode, we looked at what we now
Speaker 1: know about memory and hypnosis. Simply put, the stories they
Speaker 1: told while under hypnosis can't be regarded as an accurate
Speaker 1: recall of a real event. But if the abduction didn't happen,
Speaker 1: how were their stories so similar? I'm Toby Ball, This
Speaker 1: is strange. Arrivals Episode six, Jr. At the time of
Speaker 1: their hypnosis sessions in Dr Benjamin Simon believed that the
Speaker 1: source material was Betty's dreams can nights after this happened,
Speaker 1: I had a series of dreams for five nights. Each
Speaker 1: dream is different, which later I found I was a
Speaker 1: recall of what it happened, and the dreams were depicting
Speaker 1: what you just described to me at that point. What
Speaker 1: do you do? Where? When is it? Is it starting?
Speaker 1: Is Bonnie trouble by all of this is Bonnie as
Speaker 1: his life pattern change? Has his mood changed at all?
Speaker 1: Actually the first thing I did, but each during the
Speaker 1: next day I wrote down what I could remember my
Speaker 1: dream the following day, which would be and every time
Speaker 1: I had after So we're talking, and I wrote, I
Speaker 1: made a record on the thirty eight years to the day,
Speaker 1: and then I took and quote him away. And then
Speaker 1: later several months later, I talked to my supervise about
Speaker 1: the meaning of dreams and that she said, well, maybe
Speaker 1: it happened. That was Betty Hill talking with folklorist John
Speaker 1: Horrigan during their hypnosis sessions. Betty told Dr Simon about
Speaker 1: the nightmares that she had had over the course of
Speaker 1: five nights after the UFO encounter. Dr Simon new Barney
Speaker 1: had suffered from anxiety prior to the encounter, but Betty
Speaker 1: didn't seem to have a similar prior psychological issue. Working
Speaker 1: on the assumption that the abduction had not literally occurred,
Speaker 1: he wondered if maybe these dreams had some connection to
Speaker 1: distress she was showing under hypnosis as we heard last week.
Speaker 1: He also began to wonder if she had been telling
Speaker 1: Barney the details of these dreams. Could that be why
Speaker 1: his story matched hers. He asked her if she had
Speaker 1: talked to anyone about her dreams. This is Dr Simon
Speaker 1: on the Larry Glick radio show. In she said, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: my supervisor, my sister when we got to work with
Speaker 1: some home and have tea together, and I told her
Speaker 1: might be And she said that it was my supervisor
Speaker 1: who said, Betty, how you know all these how do
Speaker 1: you know it isn't true? This is planning the scene. Now,
Speaker 1: that had to be true. Not only had she told
Speaker 1: someone about her dreams, that person had suggested the possibility
Speaker 1: that they were more than dreams, that maybe they were memories.
Speaker 1: She also told them that the dreams had been so
Speaker 1: remarkable that she had written them down. Dr Simon recognized
Speaker 1: this as a great opportunity, so I directed her to
Speaker 1: bring in her dreams, that she would find them and
Speaker 1: bring them in the next session. She brought them and
Speaker 1: they were fully typed up by herself at the time
Speaker 1: they occurred. That's where you important one. In November, less
Speaker 1: than two months after their encounter with the UFO, Betty
Speaker 1: Hill wrote an account of her dreams in a document
Speaker 1: titled Dreams or Recall. She began this document by writing
Speaker 1: that she was going to describe her dreams in chronological
Speaker 1: order of the story, which was not the order she
Speaker 1: had dreamt them in. With a few minor discrepancies. She
Speaker 1: related the same story that she had told under hypnosis,
Speaker 1: the turn off the main highway, the figures in the road,
Speaker 1: the experience on the spacecraft, even Barney's dentures, and the
Speaker 1: discussion about squash. It is, in all important ways indistinguishable
Speaker 1: from the story she told under hypnosis and on a camp.
Speaker 1: From inspection of that, with her story, they were exactly
Speaker 1: alike with one difference. But in the dreams she went
Speaker 1: up told the r hampstanding being embodiable. That's all. They
Speaker 1: were exactly alone and still were not accept fully that
Speaker 1: they were the same. There was another discrepancy that we
Speaker 1: will look at it in a few minutes. But Dr
Speaker 1: Simon was struck not only by the nearly identical stories,
Speaker 1: but also by the way that her hypnotically recovered story
Speaker 1: seemed to reflect a kind of dream logic. By the way,
Speaker 1: when I say dreams without not only referring facts she
Speaker 1: had read, that she'd written them down, but the whole
Speaker 1: structure of the story was out of a dream. There
Speaker 1: many contradictures inconsistent with a perfect or righted dream. In fact,
Speaker 1: they're part of the nature of dreams. And so this
Speaker 1: thing was clearly filled out from me, the concept of
Speaker 1: the dream by a lot of inner materials dreams. Her
Speaker 1: recall was for Dr Simon the key to the whole
Speaker 1: abduction narrative. That gave me an answer at that fact
Speaker 1: that the fantastic story was her dreams, and we could
Speaker 1: hit that check very well with reality. So I was satisfied.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to look any further for us exclamation,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have to accept them. But connections they existed
Speaker 1: of space describe whatever they were. There is no question
Speaker 1: that her dreams and her hypnosis testimony are the same
Speaker 1: story told with very minor variations. This can be explained
Speaker 1: in two different ways. The first is the explanation that
Speaker 1: Dr Simon preferred Betty had these intense dreams and told
Speaker 1: Barney and others about them. When they eventually were hypnotized,
Speaker 1: Betty related her dreams, and Barney told what he imagined
Speaker 1: his experience would have been based on what he'd heard
Speaker 1: about her dreams. Is it plausible that Betty's string of
Speaker 1: dreams were caused by the u f O citing on
Speaker 1: the night of September I definitely wouldn't say that there's
Speaker 1: a reason to believe that something that you've dreamed bears
Speaker 1: a straightforward relationship to something that happened in real life.
Speaker 1: They're usually related to something that's happening in your real life,
Speaker 1: but they're often sort of mixing together different elements. So
Speaker 1: it might take a feeling that you've had, maybe you
Speaker 1: haven't recognized and kind of dramatized it in a story.
Speaker 1: I'm Alice rob and I'm the author of the book
Speaker 1: Why We Dream. The dreams that people tend to talk
Speaker 1: about and tell their friends about are the more dramatic ones,
Speaker 1: and of course those do happen. The reason that we
Speaker 1: have those crazy dreams is that when we're dreaming, our
Speaker 1: brain is in this different state where the emotion centers
Speaker 1: of our brain are very activated, but the rational centers
Speaker 1: that usually would keep those emotions in check are more dormant.
Speaker 1: So it is consistent with our understanding of how dreams
Speaker 1: work that Betty would have nightmares that made a story
Speaker 1: out of the anxiety she felt during their UFO encounter
Speaker 1: in the White Mountains. The other possibility is that Betty's
Speaker 1: dreams were her mind's way of bringing to the surface
Speaker 1: events that had happened the night of the encounter, memories
Speaker 1: that the alien abductors had somehow caused her and Barney
Speaker 1: to forget. If this was the case, the hypnosis sessions
Speaker 1: were uncovering actual memories of their abduction. Even if the
Speaker 1: hypnotically recalled stories weren't exactly what happened in every detail,
Speaker 1: the basic fact that they were brought aboard of spacecraft
Speaker 1: was confirmed. That's the argument if you believe the abduction
Speaker 1: story is real. I asked Alice rob if there was
Speaker 1: any research about whether dreams could conjure up memories that
Speaker 1: people had lost. Through him Nisia. The only piece of
Speaker 1: research I can think of that involves dreams of people
Speaker 1: with amnesia was this study about twenty years ago by
Speaker 1: Robert Stickold, who was studying dreams and memory consolidation. This
Speaker 1: is one of the first real scientific studies of dreams.
Speaker 1: He had people come into his lab and played Tetris
Speaker 1: for hours and then had them report their dreams and
Speaker 1: found that they would have dreams of Tatris, or dreams
Speaker 1: of tiles, or dreams that were sort of influenced by
Speaker 1: the game. So he included some regular, healthy undergraduates, and
Speaker 1: he also included some patients with amnesia. These were people
Speaker 1: with no short term memory. They were unable to remember
Speaker 1: things that had happened even just hours before. It was
Speaker 1: a small sample. It was only I think six or
Speaker 1: seven people, so I wouldn't want to read too too
Speaker 1: much into this, but they did have elements of the
Speaker 1: game in their dreams, even if they couldn't consciously remember,
Speaker 1: like the rules. They would have to relearn how to
Speaker 1: play Tetris every time. As Alice said, you can only
Speaker 1: put so much stock in a study of this size,
Speaker 1: but there is an indication that someone might be able
Speaker 1: to recall things in a dream that were lost due
Speaker 1: to amnesia. But again, as with any dream, it's not
Speaker 1: going to be a replay of actual events. Like hypnosis.
Speaker 1: It's a more complicated process. And it's not that surprising
Speaker 1: that Betty would think that her dreams were a recall
Speaker 1: of an actual event, and that those dreams would eventually
Speaker 1: function essentially as memories. There's plenty of history of people
Speaker 1: giving great significance to their dreams. I think dreams absolutely
Speaker 1: can affect how we remember things. I mean, dreams can
Speaker 1: be such powerful and emotional and lifelike experiences in ways
Speaker 1: that science can't fully explain. It makes sense to wonder
Speaker 1: sort of where they came from, and there are lots
Speaker 1: of examples of people undergoing religious conversions or changing their
Speaker 1: beliefs after powerful dreams. To me, it seems likely that
Speaker 1: Dr Simon's instinct was correct. Betty had dreams that were
Speaker 1: a reaction to her experience in the White Mountains, then
Speaker 1: under hypnosis, she recalled those dreams as if they had
Speaker 1: actually happened. This fits with what we know about dreams.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any
Speaker 1: scientific evidence that dreams can recall lost memories In the
Speaker 1: vivid detail that Betty's described, but there are some discrepancies
Speaker 1: in the details of Betty's dreams, Betty's and Barney's hypnosis testimony,
Speaker 1: and their later memories. These are most noticeable in the
Speaker 1: way the descriptions of the aliens changed over time. After
Speaker 1: the break, strange arrivals will return. In a moment. Take
Speaker 1: a second and bring up a mental image of an alien.
Speaker 1: Most people will probably think of something like this small body,
Speaker 1: big head, with an enlarged cranium, as if to accommodate
Speaker 1: a huge brain, oversized oval or catlike eyes, diminished nose
Speaker 1: and mouth, no ears to speak of. This description is
Speaker 1: what people in the UFO community call a gray. Popular
Speaker 1: culture has settled on Gray's is what aliens look like.
Speaker 1: Think close encounters of the third kind. This conception originates
Speaker 1: at least in part with the Hills description of the
Speaker 1: aliens they encountered, but they didn't initially describe the beings
Speaker 1: they encountered in this way. Their description changed as time
Speaker 1: went on. This is from Betty and Barney's ninety six
Speaker 1: appearance on the Alan Douglas Show. What was the dream
Speaker 1: like that you, gentlemen? Well, actually, so we found out
Speaker 1: right that my dreams were very, very similar. There's the
Speaker 1: information that we have changed. There were some minor differences,
Speaker 1: and I think probably the most important difference is that
Speaker 1: in my dream I may see I guess said um,
Speaker 1: and I say, more human then they were in dreams
Speaker 1: or recall. This is how she describes the alien. During
Speaker 1: this time, I became conscious of several things. First, only
Speaker 1: one man speaks in English, with a foreign accent, but
Speaker 1: very understandable. The others say nothing. I note their physical appearance.
Speaker 1: Most of the men are my height, although I cannot
Speaker 1: remember the height of the heels on my shoes. None
Speaker 1: are as tall as Marnie, so I would judge them
Speaker 1: to be five ft to five ft four inches. Their
Speaker 1: chests are larger than ours. The noses were larger, longer
Speaker 1: than the average size, though I have seen people with
Speaker 1: noses like theirs, like Jimmy Durranty's. Their complexions were of
Speaker 1: a great tone, like a great paint with black bass.
Speaker 1: Their lips were of a bluish tin. Hair and eyes
Speaker 1: were very dark, possibly black. And the men were all
Speaker 1: dressed alike, presumably in uniform of a light navy blue
Speaker 1: color with a gray shade to it. They wore trousers
Speaker 1: and short jackets that gave the appearance of zippert sport jackets,
Speaker 1: but I am not aware of zippers or buttons for closing.
Speaker 1: Shoes were a low slip on style resembling a boot.
Speaker 1: I cannot remember any jewelry or insignia. They were all
Speaker 1: wearing a military cap similar to Air Force, but not
Speaker 1: so broad on top. They were very human in appearance,
Speaker 1: not frightening. But this was not how she would describe
Speaker 1: them in her hypnosis sessions. Later, in response to a
Speaker 1: written question, apparently trying to address this discrepancy, she wrote
Speaker 1: the following reply, Her description is in keeping with the
Speaker 1: standards of the mid nineties sixties, but it's a little
Speaker 1: jarring to hear today. In my dreams, I felt I
Speaker 1: made the humanoids more like us than they really were.
Speaker 1: Under hypnosis, I described them as mongoloid, a certain type
Speaker 1: of retardation, with broad, flat faces, large slanting eyes, small
Speaker 1: flattened nose. Their body seemed out of proportion with their
Speaker 1: larger chest areas. Barney too initially described the beings as
Speaker 1: looking close to human, but as time passed this also changed.
Speaker 1: His first glimpse of the aliens came during the encounter
Speaker 1: at Indian Head when he sees the occupants of the
Speaker 1: craft looking out at him through the bank of windows.
Speaker 1: There are the roll of windows, rolls windows, just a
Speaker 1: huge row of windows. Barney describes the saucer occupants in
Speaker 1: a way that to him conjures menace. Would you see
Speaker 1: clearly yes to his face like that, I can think
Speaker 1: of his round, I think of you read him Irishman.
Speaker 1: As an African American working in Boston in the late
Speaker 1: fifties and early sixties, he associated the Irish with racist hostility.
Speaker 1: He's surprised that this quote unquote Irishman seems friendly. I
Speaker 1: don't know why. I think I know why because Irish
Speaker 1: are usually hostile to new grow and when I see
Speaker 1: my friend Gus person, I react to it, I thinking
Speaker 1: I will be from me. He focuses on another figure two,
Speaker 1: one that seems more sinister. I think this one that
Speaker 1: is looking over the children, the evil face exactly. Barney
Speaker 1: had enlisted in the Army during World War Two. The
Speaker 1: Nazi figure is another symbol of threat. I'm going to
Speaker 1: see these figures that clearly about distance. I was looking
Speaker 1: at him with the Marcos Oh I think it's safe
Speaker 1: to say that his descriptions here while under hypnosis are
Speaker 1: probably reflective of his emotional reaction, not his visual perception.
Speaker 1: I as we have heard, Barney kept his eyes tightly
Speaker 1: shut for most of his time on the craft, but
Speaker 1: he did open them briefly while he was being examined
Speaker 1: on the table. I saw this kind of grayish color,
Speaker 1: and this is I think, because most people they're not.
Speaker 1: We saw a little green men. And they were not
Speaker 1: green men. They were a grayish, metallic kind of gray
Speaker 1: in color. And I might also say that I'm quite
Speaker 1: sure they were not wearing a mask, rather any kind
Speaker 1: of apparatus over the head for breathing purposes, because I
Speaker 1: could see what would have been out a thin line
Speaker 1: without a lip muffle that when potty when opened, there
Speaker 1: was a membrane inside that fluttered really red at the
Speaker 1: end of the mouth the towel, and this fluttered. And
Speaker 1: this seemed to be a way that they communicated with
Speaker 1: one another with a very peculiar kind of bumbling. Uh.
Speaker 1: This description maintains the threatening feel of Barney's earlier descriptions
Speaker 1: of the Irishman in the Nazi, but this being is
Speaker 1: clearly not human, and unlike the beings Betty described in
Speaker 1: earlier episodes, Barney's doesn't seem likely to exchange and friendly banter.
Speaker 1: Betty and Barney worked with a new Hampshire artist named
Speaker 1: David Baker to create drawings of the aliens. Baker wrote
Speaker 1: the Hills a letter on October two. It seems that
Speaker 1: he had shown them preliminary sketches and they had apparently
Speaker 1: been dissatisfied. In the letter, he tries to address their objections,
Speaker 1: and I think it gives some insights into their perceptions
Speaker 1: of the aliens. He writes eyes slanted opening, rounding sides
Speaker 1: of face, indicating peripheral vision. Anatomy for such eyes would
Speaker 1: indicate bone structure or to protect such in large eyeballs
Speaker 1: as indicated, would extend cheekbones, round curve of ron facial plate,
Speaker 1: giving a look to eyes, if not so much oriental
Speaker 1: as like a cat's eyes. Someone, maybe Betty, has written
Speaker 1: yes in the margin next to this observation. Baker, probably
Speaker 1: referring to Barney's description of a membrane in one of
Speaker 1: the aliens mouths, theorizes that the aliens might be wearing
Speaker 1: some kind of protective film that would distort their features,
Speaker 1: much like a bank robber wearing a stocking over his head,
Speaker 1: pushing his nose flat, pulling his mouth tight, and blurring
Speaker 1: facial details. This theory is met simply with a question mark.
Speaker 1: Baker's completed drawings are held at the Milne Special Collections
Speaker 1: and Archives at the University of New Hampshire. They portray
Speaker 1: what you'd expect, strange figures with large eyes, clad in
Speaker 1: the garb that Betty and Barney described, caps, scarves, jackets. Intriguingly,
Speaker 1: there's also a haziness to the images is if visually
Speaker 1: representing the uncertain process of recall. When you consider that
Speaker 1: this is an attempt to portray beings that they considered
Speaker 1: to be real, the sketches are pretty eerie, But there's
Speaker 1: something else in the archive. The Betty and Barney Hill
Speaker 1: papers are spread among some fourteen boxes. Most of the
Speaker 1: boxes hold some combination of papers, photographs, and documents. Oversized
Speaker 1: Box four, though, holds a very strange artifact, the sculpture
Speaker 1: of an alien bust. It's called JR. As best as
Speaker 1: they've been able to figure out, it's made of some
Speaker 1: kind of resin molded over a window screen core. It's
Speaker 1: putty colored with a hint of green. Believe it or not,
Speaker 1: this bus was sculpted by Marjorie Fish, the same Marjorie
Speaker 1: Fish who constructed the models that pointed to Zeta reticuli
Speaker 1: as the origin of the star map. She sculpted the
Speaker 1: bust based on David Baker's drawings as well as her own,
Speaker 1: which she also made in consultation with Betty. Contrasted to
Speaker 1: Baker's drawings, marjorie sketches are very clear and simple, like
Speaker 1: something you'd see in a well drawn comic book. To
Speaker 1: see Junior in person is jarring. It has a presence.
Speaker 1: Here's Betty showing Junior to John Horrigan during the interview.
Speaker 1: This is Junior. Now. This is a casado composit of
Speaker 1: the individual differences. They do not look alike. There's as
Speaker 1: much different between among them is there is any group
Speaker 1: of people. But this basically shows a characteristics allowed your eyes, nose, mouth,
Speaker 1: no protruding pot No, but this one this is because
Speaker 1: he fell off the podium in St. Louis. Okay. So
Speaker 1: Buddy's okay though, but he hasn't pronounced brown Ridge. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: as you said, a pug knows um more or less
Speaker 1: a very small orifice for a mouth, and actually, instead
Speaker 1: of white's actually have yellow eyes and eyes I see
Speaker 1: irishes and pupil. We put the yellow in Okay to
Speaker 1: emphasize him. I was gonna say he needs vizine or
Speaker 1: or he looks like he has malaria, but okay, okay.
Speaker 1: Now Junior has been evaluated by I don't know how
Speaker 1: many physical anthropologists, but what he looks like now, if
Speaker 1: we continue along the path of evolution, this is what
Speaker 1: we're going to look like in years. Junior looks like
Speaker 1: an early prototype of a gray It's cranium is enlarged,
Speaker 1: but not as much as you'd expect. The eyes are
Speaker 1: big and somewhat at an angle, but again not as
Speaker 1: exaggerated is what we're used to now. Also, the eyes
Speaker 1: have gray irises, black pupils, and as you just heard,
Speaker 1: the whites of the eyes are a kind of lemon yellow.
Speaker 1: The nose and mouth are barely there. The mouth is
Speaker 1: just four lines etched into the face. It makes me
Speaker 1: wonder if maybe this was more of a product of
Speaker 1: what she quote unquote remembered most about the aliens instead
Speaker 1: of what they looked like. The eyes had drawn her
Speaker 1: the rest of the face was an afterthought. Betty would
Speaker 1: later claim that the grays that we think of now
Speaker 1: were not what she saw. Let's just go back to
Speaker 1: those type of entities. Um, they were your classic alien,
Speaker 1: gray shaped cat like No, no, they weren't. Okay, human
Speaker 1: being there were, there are a form of human beings.
Speaker 1: Did they have cat like or chestire like eyes? They
Speaker 1: had larger eyes than ours, smaller nose, a smaller mouth,
Speaker 1: no protruding part of the era. Noa nothing like these
Speaker 1: classic grays. You see your Whitley streamers. Da, I'll never
Speaker 1: say nos. I don't know what the okay she said.
Speaker 1: What she saw was closer in appearance to a tribe
Speaker 1: of indigenous people living near Antarctica that she learned about
Speaker 1: at a presentation she attended an Exeter, New Hampshire. Junior
Speaker 1: in fact, looks to be some kind of midpoint between
Speaker 1: a human and the stereotypical gray alien. I understand her
Speaker 1: point that what she saw isn't exactly what we think
Speaker 1: of now, but her description of the aliens as shown
Speaker 1: by Junior is an important step in creating the public
Speaker 1: understanding of what an alien looks like. The question that
Speaker 1: this begs is if they didn't have an actual encounter.
Speaker 1: Where did they get this idea of an aliens appearance?
Speaker 1: Well maybe from TV skeptoid host Brian Dunning. So for
Speaker 1: a long time the people have been pointing to this
Speaker 1: episode of The Outer Limits called the Bollerro Shield as
Speaker 1: probably what inspired Barney Hill's description under hypnosis of what
Speaker 1: these alien characters look like, because it came out at
Speaker 1: the right time that it's it's likely that he would
Speaker 1: have seen this on TV or possible anyway, and there
Speaker 1: wasn't really anything else in popular culture that might have
Speaker 1: informed his idea of what an alien would look like
Speaker 1: besides this. I mean, you could just do a Google
Speaker 1: search for the Bollerro Shield and you'll see what this
Speaker 1: alien looks like, and it's like, yeah, it looks kind
Speaker 1: of alien like, but it doesn't really look all that
Speaker 1: much like our concept of what we think of as
Speaker 1: a gray alien today. The Bolerro Shield episode of The
Speaker 1: Outer Limits ran twelve days before the Hill's first hypnosis session.
Speaker 1: The story is about a devious woman who tries to
Speaker 1: steal futuristic technology from a benign, highly advanced alien, only
Speaker 1: to have her plan backfire. Can you read my mind? Even?
Speaker 1: Do you see it. I cannot read your mind. I
Speaker 1: cannot even understand your language. The first thing you have
Speaker 1: to understand about the alien in this episode is that
Speaker 1: it looks like a person wearing a mask. It's pretty
Speaker 1: ridiculous by today's standard, and the alien doesn't really resemble Junior,
Speaker 1: but you could describe it as having oversized eyes, negligible nose,
Speaker 1: no ears, and a thin mouth. So the descriptions seem similar,
Speaker 1: even if they don't look too much alike again, Brian Dunning.
Speaker 1: But then recently I heard from one of my listeners,
Speaker 1: just in the last year or so that they found
Speaker 1: an older episode from the Twilight Zone from April ninety
Speaker 1: two called hocus Pocus and Frisbee, and that had an
Speaker 1: alien character in it that looked way more like what
Speaker 1: we think of as a gray alien and way more
Speaker 1: like what Barney Hill described. Man. Last time I saw
Speaker 1: anything that looked like you, I've been four days on
Speaker 1: the corn jug and the timing for that was interesting.
Speaker 1: That came out two years before they did the hypnosis,
Speaker 1: so after they say the incident happened. So it's possible
Speaker 1: that that Betty could have seen it, or that Barney
Speaker 1: could have seen it. Or that they both watched it.
Speaker 1: Who knows so right now, that's that's kind of my
Speaker 1: favorite explanation of where their description came from and why
Speaker 1: it happens to match what we think of as a
Speaker 1: typical gray alien today. Again, the alien here is basically
Speaker 1: a guy in a mask, but Brian is right that
Speaker 1: it is more like what Betty and Barney described. In particular,
Speaker 1: the noses just two slots, and the mouth is essentially
Speaker 1: not there. Betty and Barney claimed not to have seen
Speaker 1: the episode of The Outer Limits, and I haven't found
Speaker 1: anything that says whether or not they saw the Twilight
Speaker 1: Zone episode. I don't think the Twilight Zone theory was
Speaker 1: around while Betty was still alive. Regardless, there are opportunities
Speaker 1: to see an ad or an image from a television
Speaker 1: show without watching the whole show itself. What does this
Speaker 1: all mean, Well, there was a process that began with
Speaker 1: the actual UFO citing and continued through Betty's dreams, the
Speaker 1: hypnosis sessions, and various attempts to produce likenesses on paper
Speaker 1: and through sculpture. The description of the aliens changed over
Speaker 1: this period of time, which is not unexpected given what
Speaker 1: we know about memory. But most critically, the change in
Speaker 1: description from human like creature is two more exotic aliens
Speaker 1: happened during hypnosis sessions, and that change reflected popular conceptions
Speaker 1: of aliens in television shows at the time. It shows
Speaker 1: how the Hill story might have changed in response to
Speaker 1: outside cultural factors. It could be that this process was
Speaker 1: towards an ever more accurate understanding of what they'd seen,
Speaker 1: but the simpler explanation is that the description of these
Speaker 1: figures was reflective of their expectation of what they would
Speaker 1: see on a UFO rather than a memory. While we
Speaker 1: have spent time looking at the story that the Hills
Speaker 1: recalled under hypnosis, none of this really reflects on the
Speaker 1: original continuously recalled memories of the trip on the night
Speaker 1: of September, the night that they saw light in the
Speaker 1: sky that eventually became a craft hovering above a field.
Speaker 1: Dr Simon believed that the abduction and was from Betty's dreams,
Speaker 1: but he felt that something had happened to the Hills
Speaker 1: that night. The question is what next time on Strange Arrivals.
Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written
Speaker 1: and hosted by Toby Bowl and produced by Miranda Hawkins
Speaker 1: and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick
Speaker 1: and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey.
Speaker 1: Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: the miln's Special Collections and archives at the University of
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y A M in Norwich, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the
Speaker 1: History Channel's dramatic series Project blue Book. Learn more about
Speaker 1: the show over at GRIMM and mil dot com. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from I Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio
Speaker 1: app Double Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.