![]() ![]() Barney pulled off the road and Betty looked at the object through binoculars, noting that it appeared to be saucer-shaped and was flashing multicolored lights. It seemed to be following them as they continued, bouncing back and forth in the night sky. They’d been on a short trip to Niagra Falls and Montreal.Īlong the way, they sighted a light in the sky that was moving in a strange manner – unlike a satellite or conventional aircraft. Route 3, on their way to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On the evening of September 19-20, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving south down U.S. THE BETTY AND BARNEY HILL ABDUCTION CASE IN BRIEF Simon believed such things simply couldn’t happen. What it seemed to boil down to, however, was that Dr. How that explained the very real psychic trauma the couple exhibited even after several years was never clear. The explanation Simon settled on was that, early on, Barney had internalized Betty’s descriptions of dreams resembling the story they’d eventually recounted in his office. At one point, the doctor said, he feared that Barney might try to jump out of the office window. Simon told me that he had never had a patient become so excited under hypnosis. According to the notoriously aggressive UFO debunker, Philip Klass:ĭr. Indeed, the couple experienced a level of hysteria under hypnosis that was more extreme than the victims of shell shock he’d worked with previously. They were productive, respected members of their community and had no reason to perpetrate such an elaborate hoax. ![]() It wasn’t that he felt they were lying or insane. Simon didn’t believe that the Hills story was true. The animation was designed with the intention that it not distract from the couple’s voices and all they communicate through words and tone.ĭr. Simon’s recordings of the Hills’ hypnosis sessions. For the central video projection in the main gallery, I went with the most straightforward and immediately comprehensible approach by using excerpts from Dr. And, apart from creating something compelling, I felt that it was important to convey a sense of their sincerity and how profoundly they seem to have been affected by their experience. When I was given the opportunity to do this show at Machine Project, I knew that I wanted to make at least some of the work about the Hills. And, for whatever reasons, the kinds of questions it raised about the nature of humanity and its place in the universe stuck with me. This story of an encounter with a UFO and its occupants seemed implausible, though enough of it rang true to make it fascinating and somewhat unsettling. Of course I had heard of flying saucers, but I’d never seen one and had never given the subject much thought. ![]() My introduction to the Hills was through a TV docudrama starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons called The UFO Incident (1975) that I watched late one night as a young teenager. ![]() Benjamin Simon’s use of hypnotic regression to uncover a period of “missing time” experienced by the couple was particularly notable it was a technique he employed in his pioneering treatment of what is now usually referred to as “posttraumatic stress disorder.” Several of the pieces I made for the installation in Machine Project’s main gallery were inspired by the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case of 1961. In short, it is what it is, though the ultimate source of these experiences remains a mystery. I would only point out that as a clinician, I have spent countless hours trying to find alternate explanations that would not require the major shift in my worldview that I have had to face… But… no familiar theory or explanation has come even close to accounting for the basic features of the abduction phenomenon. I cannot discourage those who try to discover conventional explanations for the abduction phenomenon. ![]()
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