Speaker 1: Welcome to Podcast UFO. I'm Martin Willis, your host. Before
Speaker 1: we begin a quick look at what's coming up next week.
Speaker 1: On Tuesday at APM Eastern, my guest will be Yell
Speaker 1: trained philosopher Christopher Noel, and he's going to be talking
Speaker 1: about UFOs and consciousness, which I still don't understand. Then,
Speaker 1: on Thursday at APM Eastern, will be joined by the
Speaker 1: legendary UFO researcher Shock Vala. Also be sure to visit
Speaker 1: podcastufo dot com for this week's fascinating blog by Charles Lear,
Speaker 1: a nineteen eighty eight report of a UFO landing on
Speaker 1: frozen Lake Erie. Charles always dives into these great historical cases,
Speaker 1: so check that out over at podcastufo dot com. Tonight's
Speaker 1: guest is Matthew Bowman, Professor of History and Religion at
Speaker 1: Claremont Graduate University, where he also holds the Howard W.
Speaker 1: Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies. He is the author of
Speaker 1: several books, including the Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill
Speaker 1: And that was published by Yale University Press in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three. Because of scheduling issues, I had to pre
Speaker 1: record this with Matthew Bowman.
Speaker 2: This afternoon.
Speaker 1: Ronnie LeBlanc, our guest for this week, canceled at the
Speaker 1: last minute yesterday, and this program was originally scheduled to
Speaker 1: be airing on Thursday, but I will be live tonight
Speaker 1: in the chat room and participating with all you that
Speaker 1: are watching this live.
Speaker 2: If you'd like.
Speaker 1: An ad free experience on audio, all you have to
Speaker 1: do is go to podcastufo dot com, go to our
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Speaker 1: Thank you all, and I'm ready to bring in our guests.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Matt, thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1: Yes, so I have to ask you before we get started.
Speaker 1: You have very interesting background, first of all, and there's
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've looked into this topic how deeply,
Speaker 1: but that there's people out there like the professor Diana Posolka.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with Yeah, yes, yeah, So there's a
Speaker 1: you know, there's a connection. There seems to be a
Speaker 1: connection between religion and the UFO topic. And sometimes I
Speaker 1: feel as though there's a need for someone. I like
Speaker 1: the idea of there being something else out there. Myself
Speaker 1: I know it's hard to get the proof of that,
Speaker 1: but I think I.
Speaker 2: Feel like we're heading in that direction.
Speaker 1: But I have to ask you, what are your thoughts
Speaker 1: in general about, say, the UFO topic and the possibility
Speaker 1: of other life if out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up Diana, and as
Speaker 3: well Jeff Cripel, who is another friend of mine. I
Speaker 3: think a lot of people in the academy who study
Speaker 3: UFOs are people from religious studies, right. I think there
Speaker 3: is a sort of affinity there because people who do
Speaker 3: religious studies are really interested in the kinds of questions
Speaker 3: that you bring up, Questions really about human experience, right,
Speaker 3: and how we categorize the things that happened to us,
Speaker 3: how we label and explain those sorts of things. And
Speaker 3: one of the fundamental ideas I think of exploration of
Speaker 3: the phenomenon, as some folks call it, goes all the
Speaker 3: way back to Jacques Plais, right, who said that we
Speaker 3: might see, say, a fiery ball in the sky, and
Speaker 3: if you lived a thousand years ago, you might say
Speaker 3: that fiery ball in the sky is an angel. If
Speaker 3: you lived two thousand years before that, you might say
Speaker 3: it's a demon or a ghost, But today we're more
Speaker 3: inclined to say it's technology because we live in a
Speaker 3: technological world. We live in a world science is the
Speaker 3: dominant paradigm by which we explain things. And that's the
Speaker 3: sort of thing that people who study religious studies are
Speaker 3: really interested in. Right, how do we account for the
Speaker 3: things that seem strange or anomalist? Because and this goes
Speaker 3: to the question that you just asked me, I think
Speaker 3: things that seem strange or anomalists are all around us.
Speaker 3: Everyone experiences them all the time. It's extraordinarily common to
Speaker 3: have things that you cannot otherwise explain happen to you.
Speaker 3: And the question is what sort of language do you
Speaker 3: use to try to make sense of that thing? Do
Speaker 3: you use the language of science? Do you use the
Speaker 3: language of religion? And that's the thing that really interests me, Right,
Speaker 3: how do we decide what language we use is to
Speaker 3: explain the stranger the anomalists. That's the kind of thing
Speaker 3: that I am interested in studying. And I think that
Speaker 3: certainly in Diana's book American Cosmic is very much about
Speaker 3: this sort of thing as well.
Speaker 1: I have developed this thought over the more I've looked
Speaker 1: at this topic, and other things, but mostly the and
Speaker 1: I try to look at it in a real balanced way,
Speaker 1: but I have the feeling that we really do not
Speaker 1: really know a lot about what's going on around us.
Speaker 1: I think that there's some weird things. We have this
Speaker 1: certain spectrum we can see in and our senses and
Speaker 1: things like that, but I feel like there's weird things
Speaker 1: going on that we have no clue we're.
Speaker 2: Among these things that happened.
Speaker 1: I've had some unusual things happen in my life that
Speaker 1: I have no explanation for. One of them was my
Speaker 1: UFO sighting that got me involved in this, but there's
Speaker 1: been other a few other things that have happened that, wow,
Speaker 1: no explanation that can figure out no matter how I try,
Speaker 1: even if it could be scientific, I don't know how
Speaker 1: one thing happened that could have happened in any type
Speaker 1: of possible way. So I know that through the ages
Speaker 1: we always turn to, you know, like religions. It would
Speaker 1: explain a lot of the things that happened and the
Speaker 1: miracles and these type of things because we had no
Speaker 1: other explanation for it. Good exact sample as that I
Speaker 1: think it was in the sixteenth century, there was what
Speaker 1: they think was a super nova occurrence that was all
Speaker 1: of a sudden the bright light in the sky, and
Speaker 1: of course they thought it was religion had explanations for
Speaker 1: that that type of thing.
Speaker 3: This is something I'll tell my students a lot right
Speaker 3: when I'm teaching religious studies classes in the history of religion,
Speaker 3: and I'll give them, for instance, the experiences of someone
Speaker 3: like Joan of arc Right, who heard voices, who saw angels,
Speaker 3: And I'll put out to my students this thing is
Speaker 3: actually quite common in almost all societies other than the
Speaker 3: modern West, even today in Latin America and in Africa
Speaker 3: and the global South. People take it simply as a
Speaker 3: matter of course that there are in fact supernatural creatures
Speaker 3: in the world. The possessions are possible, the visions are
Speaker 3: come right, and so these kinds of experiences that we
Speaker 3: today would judge as a nominalists are strange, are actually
Speaker 3: quite common throughout the course of human And the only
Speaker 3: question is, then, how do we, as I said before,
Speaker 3: how do we explain them? What language do we use
Speaker 3: to try to bring them into the world that we
Speaker 3: already live in, the world that we can make sense.
Speaker 3: And for some people that is the language of religion.
Speaker 3: You see that today. I think with UFO. JD. Van's,
Speaker 3: the vice president, a few months ago, told an interviewer
Speaker 3: that he believed that these strange things in the sky
Speaker 3: are demons, which I think makes sense coming from the
Speaker 3: Catholic tradition that he has embraced. There's a long kind
Speaker 3: of tradition of that sort of thing. But other people
Speaker 3: will say, no, they are not demons. They are simply spacecraft.
Speaker 3: They are not, unlike the Apollo eleven mission, just another
Speaker 3: civilization built them in another putet and flew them here.
Speaker 3: That's simply another way of bringing these things into language
Speaker 3: that makes sense to us, that we can understand. But
Speaker 3: as you say, I think, and this is the thing
Speaker 3: that really fascinates me about the UFO as kind of
Speaker 3: an object of study, UFOs cross all these boundaries. Cannot
Speaker 3: contain them in science, you cannot contain them in religion,
Speaker 3: and that shows how we humans build these categories. We
Speaker 3: create the language of science and use it to explain
Speaker 3: the world. But the language of science always bumps up
Speaker 3: against walls, and it cannot explain it's on the other
Speaker 3: side of that wall. The same is true, I think
Speaker 3: for many religious traditions as well. And I think you
Speaker 3: are breaking down these boundaries all the time, and they
Speaker 3: force us to see how artificial those boundaries are in
Speaker 3: the first place.
Speaker 1: Well, you think about our history, our human history, but
Speaker 1: it only goes back to what we know. What is it,
Speaker 1: six thousand years of written history, So you think about
Speaker 1: it in that way, makes you wonder how things were
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand years ago, or through human development and
Speaker 1: whatever types of societies that were being built back then.
Speaker 1: It's too bad that we can't understand any of those
Speaker 1: past thoughts and any type of documentation or any type
Speaker 1: of way, but it makes you wonder throughout the development
Speaker 1: of humankind what happened along those lines, because I do
Speaker 1: believe that I think what people are seeing may have
Speaker 1: been seen for a long time. There are accounts that
Speaker 1: go you mentioned Jock Vla. He did a really great
Speaker 1: Oh he's coming up next week, by the way, but
Speaker 1: he did a great.
Speaker 2: Book on going as far back as.
Speaker 1: They can and documentation of people reporting anomalous things in
Speaker 1: the sky. And I found an account from seventeen ninety
Speaker 1: six I believe it is, and a written account on
Speaker 1: a ship that's really amazing. It's called the Perkins Document.
Speaker 1: I believe it is. But so let's shift gears a
Speaker 1: little bit. What made you decide to write about the
Speaker 1: Betty and the name of the book. First of all
Speaker 1: is the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, Alien Encounter,
Speaker 1: civil Rights, and the New Age in America by you,
Speaker 1: of course, Matthew Wowman. So what made you decide to
Speaker 1: take that on and write that book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question. Some of the things you've
Speaker 3: already been talking about. I am as a scholar of religion.
Speaker 3: I specialize in religion and modern America post Civil War
Speaker 3: or so. I've written about Mormonism, I've written about evangelicalism
Speaker 3: and fundamentalism. But I was really interested in those boundaries,
Speaker 3: and I mentioned earlier that is, what do we consider
Speaker 3: legitimately religious in America? What do we consider legitimately scientific
Speaker 3: in America? What's some way I could explore where those
Speaker 3: boundaries are, how they got set up? And there's no
Speaker 3: better way to explore these boundaries than to find something
Speaker 3: that violates them. The throw is that makes people worry
Speaker 3: that something is not scientific, that makes people worried that
Speaker 3: something that purports to be religious is not actually religious,
Speaker 3: And so I begin to looking at UFOs for that reason,
Speaker 3: because they cross all of these boundaries. They make people.
Speaker 3: UFOs make people intensely uncomfortable because they are not so
Speaker 3: easily explained right, and they force us to grapple with
Speaker 3: the limits of our own knowledge. So I begin looking
Speaker 3: at initial I wanted to look at UFO religions, right,
Speaker 3: these people who have developed out of UFO experiences something
Speaker 3: that kind of mirrors other religious groups in America, people
Speaker 3: who have developed things that look like religions based on UFOs,
Speaker 3: like Unaris, for instance, or really Scientology, which is the
Speaker 3: most famous of these. But there have been a number
Speaker 3: of really good books on scientology recently, so I didn't
Speaker 3: know one else there might be for me to contribute
Speaker 3: to that. And as I was poking around, I discovered
Speaker 3: that the family of Betty Hill, particularly her niece Kathleen Martin,
Speaker 3: had donated the Hill papers to the University of New
Speaker 3: Hampshire library. Had been no book using the Hill papers
Speaker 3: other than Kathleen's own book, and I thought, well, there's
Speaker 3: nothing that a historian likes better than an archive that
Speaker 3: virtually no historian has looked at. So I thought I
Speaker 3: would just go up there see what's in these papers,
Speaker 3: and then decide if there would be a book at it.
Speaker 3: And the papers are wonderful. There's boxes upon boxes of
Speaker 3: correspond of letters. As I'm begin looking around, I found
Speaker 3: there were other caches of letters that the Hills had written.
Speaker 3: There's some in Roswell the International UFO Museum. There there's
Speaker 3: a wonderful collection of letters there. There's also some at
Speaker 3: the Center for Ufolk Studies, which Mark Rodeger runs now
Speaker 3: in Chicago. So I thought, wow, there's really a wonderful
Speaker 3: story here. And it's not as though the Hills have
Speaker 3: not been written about. Of course, they've been written about, right.
Speaker 3: It's one of the most significant DUFO cases in American history.
Speaker 3: But nearly everybody who's written about it has relied on
Speaker 3: John Fuller's book from nineteen sixtyty six, which is largely
Speaker 3: based on interviews that John Fuller did with the Hills
Speaker 3: and with Benjamin Simon. They're a psychiatrists as well. And
Speaker 3: as I went actually to Benjamin or I'm sorry, to
Speaker 3: John Fuller's own archive which is in Boston, and I
Speaker 3: found the transcripts of those interviews, and it turns out
Speaker 3: that John Fuller actually messed with him. He misquoted the Hills.
Speaker 3: Sometimes he edited their interview he was in the book,
Speaker 3: he changed it. So sometimes in the book it says
Speaker 3: the Barney said something, when in fact the interview truns
Speaker 3: from showed that it was Betty who said it. So
Speaker 3: the Boo book, I think, is rather unreliable, and people
Speaker 3: who rely only on it are going to miss the
Speaker 3: boat to some extent. So all of this, I think
Speaker 3: showed to me that there really was a lot more
Speaker 3: that could be said about the Hills, and that their
Speaker 3: story could be used, I think, to illustrate some of
Speaker 3: what was going on in America generally in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 3: the ways in which the UFOs and I think belief
Speaker 3: in the UFOs, began breaking down the American cultural consensus
Speaker 3: in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, how UFOs became
Speaker 3: a kind of vector for this new cultural movement that
Speaker 3: I in the book called the New Age movement. But
Speaker 3: that Betty and Barney's own story then was in some
Speaker 3: ways a microcosm of what was happening in the United
Speaker 3: States more generally.
Speaker 1: Now I know that I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: that knew both Betty and Barney, and it's funny I
Speaker 1: was talking too. I guess you would call my cousin
Speaker 1: in law, my cousin's husband, and she broke the news
Speaker 1: to him that I do a show on UFOs, and
Speaker 1: which they thought. Both my cousin thought I was nuts
Speaker 1: for doing that. But anyway, so he goes, Oh, I knew,
Speaker 1: he goes. I knew Barney, Barney Hill. He was my mailman.
Speaker 1: He used to sit in our parlor for an hour
Speaker 1: during his mail route and talk with his mother. I
Speaker 1: guess he was good friends with his weather and he
Speaker 1: didn't often talk about the incident itself. But it's I'm
Speaker 1: right here in Portsmouth, New Hampshire myself, and I grew
Speaker 1: up in the area, grew up in Elliott, and I
Speaker 1: only heard about it later in high school when they
Speaker 1: made a movie out of it, a four TV movie.
Speaker 1: I saw that movie and then realized, wow, right here
Speaker 1: in town. But I've met a lot of people over
Speaker 1: the years that knew both Betty and Barney and biracial couple.
Speaker 1: They had a lot of stress and because of that,
Speaker 1: and so I imagine that's part of what you wrote
Speaker 1: about as well, right that play as place part of.
Speaker 3: It yeah, yeah, I think could not play a part
Speaker 3: of it. And it actually doesn't surprise me that Barney
Speaker 3: was somewhat reticent. He always was. He was less enthusi
Speaker 3: asked about talking about the experience in public than Betty was.
Speaker 3: Betty is the one I think who felt a real
Speaker 3: drive to try to understand it, to figure out what
Speaker 3: was going on, to reach out to people. Bartie was
Speaker 3: often reluctant. In fact, in what we know about the
Speaker 3: very first phone call that they made about it to
Speaker 3: He's Air Force base, they talked to a man named
Speaker 3: Captain Henderson there, Paul Henderson, and Bartie didn't want to
Speaker 3: talk to him initially. Betty was the one who made
Speaker 3: the call, and both of them recalled later that Barney
Speaker 3: came to the phone reluctantly and he told Captain Henderson
Speaker 3: that he was worried that if this got out it
Speaker 3: would do damage to his reputation. And I think that's
Speaker 3: where you see the question of race. Right this is
Speaker 3: the mid nineteen sixties. Barney is a black man. He's
Speaker 3: in the North, and he's a black man. He's in
Speaker 3: New Hampshire where there are just we're not a lot
Speaker 3: of black people in the early nineteen sixties, and a
Speaker 3: real dynamic that was going on in the Civil Rights
Speaker 3: MOO when the Martin Luther King was leading, was this
Speaker 3: notion of respectability, right, and Martin Luther King knew this.
Speaker 3: That's why Martin Luk wore suits all the time. It
Speaker 3: is why he told the protesters who he was working
Speaker 3: with in this other Christian leadership conference, that when you
Speaker 3: are marching, people will attack you, they will yell at you,
Speaker 3: they will throw things at you, and you do not
Speaker 3: be aggressive back, because we want to show that we
Speaker 3: are respectable. And Barney really internalized that, right. So he
Speaker 3: was always worried that he might be judged for his race,
Speaker 3: and it was very important to him to appear respectable.
Speaker 3: This came naturally to him in many ways, because, as
Speaker 3: you say in this anecdote, he was a kind of
Speaker 3: gregarious person. They both were. They loved talking to people,
Speaker 3: They were very extroverted. But Barney always had that in
Speaker 3: the back of his head. I think this worry about
Speaker 3: being judged disreputable, disrespect well, and he was worried that
Speaker 3: the story of this incident would do damage to his reputation.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned to you off air, my producer read
Speaker 1: a book and had a couple of questions that she
Speaker 1: wanted me to ask.
Speaker 2: And you just mentioned PA's.
Speaker 1: Air Force base, which is I used to actually live
Speaker 1: in Elliot, Maine, and I lived on a hill up
Speaker 1: on a hill on the other side of the River
Speaker 1: of Peas Air Force. I could look directly at it,
Speaker 1: and I used to watch planes land there. I watched
Speaker 1: weather balloons. I watched actually our whole house shook one
Speaker 1: time and there was a crash in the runway.
Speaker 2: I saw the big fireball and everything. But here's the
Speaker 2: question here.
Speaker 1: Although the Air Force did not openly investigate the Hills
Speaker 1: case beyond the initial report, the Pentagon officials reportedly requested
Speaker 1: the files from Wright Patterson after John Hutrell's articles appeared
Speaker 1: in The Boston Traveler and John Fuller's book was published.
Speaker 1: Does this suggest that there may have been a greater
Speaker 1: official interest in the case that was publicly acknowledged.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think quite possibly, And certainly we do know
Speaker 3: that the Air Force did request to read our readings
Speaker 3: so which ultimately were inconclusive. There were some hits that
Speaker 3: false hits are quite common, and ultimately they judged it
Speaker 3: not worth pursuing. But as the case got more and
Speaker 3: more attention, this was happening at the same time, of course,
Speaker 3: the Project Bluebook was getting more and more attention than it,
Speaker 3: which eventually covidates in the content reports from the late
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties. So I think he had that. It's entirely
Speaker 3: plausible to me that they took a second look at
Speaker 3: Betty and Barney Hill's story.
Speaker 1: And I know my good friend who's unfortunately no longer
Speaker 1: with us, Leasepiegel, I think he found a document to
Speaker 1: put it out there that was directly related to Project
Speaker 1: Bluebook and P's Air Force base. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you ever saw any part of that, but that there
Speaker 1: was some little form or something he found he put
Speaker 1: it out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, this is the report that Paul Henderson filed
Speaker 3: that he filled out after this conversation with the Hills.
Speaker 3: It's a couple of pages long. He does a little
Speaker 3: audit of what Barney described and Betty described to them,
Speaker 3: and yeah, he did file it away. So that's actually
Speaker 3: widely available. I think it's been uploaded onto the internet
Speaker 3: a few times, and it is it is the first
Speaker 3: written document we have about the Hills' case. Betty wrote
Speaker 3: a letter a bit later to Donald Keiho a few
Speaker 3: days after that because she was disappointed that Henderson and
Speaker 3: he's nobody ever following up with her, but that even
Speaker 3: that letter is a few days after this report, so
Speaker 3: it is I believe it stated September twenty first, so
Speaker 3: just two days after the siding. If you think the
Speaker 3: setting happened before midnight on the nineteenth or in the
Speaker 3: morning of the twentieth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think this is great that you went through.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you went through the papers themselves.
Speaker 2: And I know what that's like.
Speaker 1: I've done a lot of research I'm in I'm a
Speaker 1: fine art and a researcher and also I do a
Speaker 1: lot of historical.
Speaker 2: Documents things like that.
Speaker 1: So I have spent a whole month on a sign
Speaker 1: of the Declaration I was involved in auction years ago,
Speaker 1: been an entire month in the archives of New Hampshire.
Speaker 1: I know what that's like and how daunting that can be.
Speaker 1: I mean, what type of papers are we talking about?
Speaker 1: How many are we talking about?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there are six boxes in the Hill Collection
Speaker 3: at the University of New Hampshire. And just so people
Speaker 3: have a visual of this, when I say boxes, the
Speaker 3: standard archival boxes, a banker's box, so we're talking to
Speaker 3: you a couple of feet by a couple of feet.
Speaker 3: Those boxes are full. There are oversized boxes as well.
Speaker 3: The oversized boxers actually have some of David Baker's art
Speaker 3: in them. David Baker, of course, being the Hill family
Speaker 3: friend who illustrated some of what they described to him.
Speaker 3: The images of the creatures that Betty and Bardie Hill
Speaker 3: described to him are he painted, and that's how we
Speaker 3: have a sense for the visuals of what they look like.
Speaker 3: There are some of those paintings reproduced in the book,
Speaker 3: but most of the boxes are letters. There are extensive
Speaker 3: letters between the Hills and all sorts of people, just
Speaker 3: local family friends. There are letters between them and producers
Speaker 3: in Hollywood, various people who wanted them to come and
Speaker 3: speak after the Fuller book was published. A lot of
Speaker 3: letters between them and people like Walter Webb. Walter Webb
Speaker 3: was the kind of primary representative of Donald Kehoe's organization
Speaker 3: who came and investigated them and interviewed them and then
Speaker 3: wrote a couple of reports of their story. And many
Speaker 3: letters from the Hills themselves, most of them actually are
Speaker 3: from Betty. Betty appears to be the one who handle
Speaker 3: most of the correspondents, who did much of the writing.
Speaker 3: But there are some letters from Barnie as well. And
Speaker 3: then finally there is a lot of autobiographical fragments that
Speaker 3: Betty wrote. She seems to have always been writing just
Speaker 3: little essays about her life, your essays titled things like
Speaker 3: my dreams, my marriage, or she just reminisces about these
Speaker 3: sorts of things. And those little fragments I think are
Speaker 3: so valuable because they both give us a sense for
Speaker 3: what was going on with the Hills, but also a
Speaker 3: sense for what Betty particularly was like as a person
Speaker 3: right And of course she's been for twenty two years now,
Speaker 3: and it's I think so wonderful to have so much
Speaker 3: of her own voice still with us. I mentioned earlier
Speaker 3: there were some Hill material in other places as well,
Speaker 3: As I said, there's another cache of letters in Roswell,
Speaker 3: New Mexico, the International UFO Museum and Archive. They've got
Speaker 3: a series of letters between Betty and her friend Marjorie Fish.
Speaker 3: Marjorie Fish, of course, is the one who later designed
Speaker 3: the star map based on Betty's recovered memory of a
Speaker 3: map that she saw while on the spacecraft Marjorie Fish
Speaker 3: designed it physically. She hung all sorts of little balls
Speaker 3: from wires in her living room, trying to reconstruct the
Speaker 3: universe so she could try to map out where the
Speaker 3: starmap actually was. She and Betti became great friends in
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies, and there's a lot of letters between
Speaker 3: the two of them that are in Roswell, New Mexico. Then,
Speaker 3: as I said, there are some as well in Chicago
Speaker 3: at the Center for UFO Studies up there, and this
Speaker 3: was of course Alan Heinex organization that Mark Rudeger now runs.
Speaker 3: And there there's a lot of letters but actually between
Speaker 3: about the Hills, but also from the Hills as well,
Speaker 3: especially some material from Santon Friedman, the great UFO investigator,
Speaker 3: Santon Friedman too. Oh yeah, spend some time on the
Speaker 3: Hill case, let's see. Of course, another archive I went to,
Speaker 3: another really significant one, was the John Fuller archive in Boston,
Speaker 3: where the transcripts of the interview is that Fuller did
Speaker 3: with Betty and Bardy for his book are When I
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier how kind of revelatory those interviews were, how
Speaker 3: much he did not put into the book from those
Speaker 3: interviews as well, as I mentioned earlier, some of the
Speaker 3: things that he changed for the book that he wrote.
Speaker 3: There's also a lot of letters between Fuller and Benjamin Simon,
Speaker 3: the Hill psychiatrist there as well. So yeah, there were
Speaker 3: a few other archives I went to as well, but
Speaker 3: the bulk and my research was in those four places.
Speaker 1: So I know, I remember reading a little bit about
Speaker 1: Marjorie Fish Oakridge National Laboratory. On twenty thirteen, an astrophysics
Speaker 1: student revisited Marjorie's map from a skeptical point of view,
Speaker 1: and she was more than twenty two hundred computer models
Speaker 1: and discovered that Marjorie's identification was the closest any plate
Speaker 1: of any place in our galaxy, which I think is
Speaker 1: pretty interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, by the end of her life, Marjorie herself actually
Speaker 3: said that she was less confident in her original map
Speaker 3: than she was at the time, largely because of as
Speaker 3: the Oakridge folks discovered, right, there were just new stars
Speaker 3: that we discovered. I think that makes the map ultimately inconclusive,
Speaker 3: but perhaps doesn't completely rule it out. Carl Sagan, the
Speaker 3: great kind of skeptic. Carl Sagan said of Marjorie Fish's
Speaker 3: map that the university's three dimensional and there's actually when
Speaker 3: you get out of gravity, there's no up or down,
Speaker 3: there's no left or right, it's just all space right.
Speaker 3: And for him the map was unpersuasive because of that.
Speaker 3: But I think as we was so much else of
Speaker 3: breasts and indeterminacy.
Speaker 1: One thing I neglected to do is for the new person.
Speaker 1: I know this is like about halfway through our interview here,
Speaker 1: but for the new person that not aware of the
Speaker 1: Betty and Barney Hill lory, we should tell a nutshell
Speaker 1: just for someone just beginning to look at this topic.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if it's something, if you want
Speaker 1: to just throw it out there, because yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: give it.
Speaker 3: A sixty second rundown here. As you said earlier, Betty
Speaker 3: and Barney Hill were an international couple. Betty was white,
Speaker 3: Barney was black. They lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They
Speaker 3: were married in nineteen sixty it was the second marriage
Speaker 3: for both of them, and then in the follow nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty one they finally took a honeymoon and they decided
Speaker 3: that they wanted to drive across Upset, New York, cross
Speaker 3: into Canada around Niagara Falls, back east to Montreal, and
Speaker 3: then south from Montreal, back home. So they did this
Speaker 3: the weekend preceding September nineteenth, nineteen sixty one. The night
Speaker 3: of September nineteenth, they left Canada and began heading home.
Speaker 3: We're in a bit of a grumpy mood there. There
Speaker 3: was a storm coming in and that kind of scotch
Speaker 3: their vacation plans. The vacation had not been as fun
Speaker 3: as they I hoped it would be. But they're headed
Speaker 3: home late that night. And the one kind of timestamp
Speaker 3: we have is that they left a diner in Colborok,
Speaker 3: New Hampshire, which is way far up and right near
Speaker 3: the Canadian border. And Benny recalled the clock in the
Speaker 3: diner show ten o'clock when they left. And then they
Speaker 3: begin driving home. Now they're headed home. This is before
Speaker 3: the inner City Highway system that goes down in the
Speaker 3: center of New Hampshire, before they reach Franconia Notch, which
Speaker 3: is this big kind of mountainous area right in the
Speaker 3: center of New Hampshire where the old men of the
Speaker 3: Mountains rock Formation used to be. They saw a strange
Speaker 3: light in the sky, but the light appeared to be
Speaker 3: following them. They stop a couple of times, get out
Speaker 3: of the car, look at the light, and then they
Speaker 3: are overwhelmed with fear. They jump in their car and
Speaker 3: begin driving home as quickly as they can. When they
Speaker 3: arrive home near the time the dawn is breaking, fallow
Speaker 3: sleep and wake up. A couple of days later, Betty
Speaker 3: calls P's Air Force Base to report this. Then a
Speaker 3: couple of days after that and then they tell Pas
Speaker 3: Air Force Base that they saw a strange light. They
Speaker 3: said that the strange light actually seemed to have wings,
Speaker 3: and then it unfolded a bit like that. Then a
Speaker 3: couple days later, Betty sends a letter to Donald Keyho
Speaker 3: a Donald Keyhoe is one of the founders of NICAP,
Speaker 3: which is kind of the premier UFO investigation organization in
Speaker 3: the nineteen fifties and sixties. And in that letter, Betty
Speaker 3: tells Donald Kejo that they did not tell the Air Force.
Speaker 3: Then Barney, while looking at this craft through binoculars, believed
Speaker 3: he saw figures moving around in it. And she says
Speaker 3: in that letter, we did not tell the Air Force
Speaker 3: because we were afraid that we wouldn't be taken seriously.
Speaker 3: And that goes back to the concerns about respectability that
Speaker 3: we spoke about a little while prior, Kehoe sends out
Speaker 3: Walter Webb, who is a young astronomer who's working in Boston.
Speaker 3: He drives in sixty mos so miles north. He interviews
Speaker 3: the Hills about this and he writes a report about
Speaker 3: the But then a little while later, a couple of
Speaker 3: other nightcap folk come and visit them in October and
Speaker 3: they also do some a long interview with the Hills.
Speaker 3: Over the next couple of years, the Hills have some
Speaker 3: after effects. Betty Hill has a series of nightmares. Barnie
Speaker 3: Hill begins he develops an ulcer, he's not sleeping very well,
Speaker 3: he has a lot of stress going on in his life.
Speaker 3: And then eventually they end up in the office of
Speaker 3: Benjamin Simon, who is in Boston who's a psychiatrist who
Speaker 3: specializes in hypnosis. Simon tells the Hills that he's going
Speaker 3: to hypnotize them to try to recover more memories of
Speaker 3: this incident. He also tells them that hypnosis can in
Speaker 3: fact generate memories. The phrase that Simon uses with John
Speaker 3: Fuller as well as with the Hills as that hypnosis
Speaker 3: can recover emotional memory, but that emotional memory may not
Speaker 3: be the same as what actually happened. He separates them
Speaker 3: and hypnotizes them both, and we're now in early nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty five. Over several sessions, they come back to him
Speaker 3: all from January all the way through March. Every Saturday,
Speaker 3: they drive down to Boston. And in the course of
Speaker 3: that hypnosis, which again i'll say, they were separated, so
Speaker 3: he hypnotizes, he leaves one of them in his waiting room,
Speaker 3: he pauses the other one in his office, and he
Speaker 3: records these interviews. We have the transcript of these interviews,
Speaker 3: and over the course of those interviews a story comes
Speaker 3: out that's rather similar. In both cases, Barti Hill recalls
Speaker 3: the light landing on the road in front of their car.
Speaker 3: He recalls being taken out of his car by small
Speaker 3: creatures he does not really describe them at all. And
Speaker 3: the hypnosis, he says that they made sounds that were
Speaker 3: something like the no language that he could understand. That
Speaker 3: they took him into a room on the craft, laid
Speaker 3: him on a table, placed a cup over his genitals.
Speaker 3: He says he kept his eyes shut for most of
Speaker 3: the because who was so terrified. And then eventually they
Speaker 3: took him back. Betty Hill something similar, but with much
Speaker 3: more detail. She recalls having a long conversation with one
Speaker 3: of the creatures, whom she calls the Leader, and it's
Speaker 3: a bit unclear whether this conversation was a verbal or telepathic,
Speaker 3: that they had conversations about what they were doing when
Speaker 3: she asked what happened to Barnie when they separated the two.
Speaker 3: She also recalls being examined medically. She says a needle
Speaker 3: was inserted into her belly button, something like amnios. And
Speaker 3: so she recalls being shown a map, being shown an
Speaker 3: object that looked like a book, having a conversation with
Speaker 3: the leader about trying to explain what aage meant to humans,
Speaker 3: and then these christures do not quite understand it, and
Speaker 3: then like Barnie, being taken off and returned to the
Speaker 3: car where Barney was. After these sessions, the Hills recalled
Speaker 3: all of this. Benjamin Simon, their psychiatrist, told them that
Speaker 3: he did not believe that this had actually happened to them.
Speaker 3: He told them that he thought that these terrified memories
Speaker 3: of being captured were actually a product of their dress
Speaker 3: that they experienced while on the trip, and Barney's real
Speaker 3: fear actually that they would be attacked for being an
Speaker 3: interracial couple, which was something Barti was quite nervous about
Speaker 3: by Barty brought a pistol with them on this trip
Speaker 3: because he was so anxious about being discriminated against her,
Speaker 3: being attacked for being an interracial couple. That's what Simon
Speaker 3: thought was at the root of this. But the Hills
Speaker 3: didn't believe him. The Hill said, we have these memories.
Speaker 3: We think these memories are real. We think you are
Speaker 3: simply prejudiced against UFOs. Later on, the Hills began talking
Speaker 3: a bit more about this story, and eventually the journalist
Speaker 3: John Fuller hears about it. He writes this famous book
Speaker 3: about the case. The book sells hundreds of thousands of copies.
Speaker 3: It makes the Hills famous. They end up on talk shows.
Speaker 3: As you mentioned earlier. In nineteen seventy five, James Earl
Speaker 3: Jones makes a movie about the case. Earl Jones stars
Speaker 3: as Bartie Hill in the movie, and it becomes a
Speaker 3: kind of classic story of abduction. And even by the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties, folks like Bud Hopkins John Mack who are
Speaker 3: the Leader is an exploring an induction. In the eighties
Speaker 3: and nineties, they say that the Hill case is the
Speaker 3: paradigm case. It is the first case of Americans claiming
Speaker 3: to be inducted by lads, and in many ways paradigm
Speaker 3: for what follows. How is that that was a bit
Speaker 3: more than a minute.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was great.
Speaker 1: So I do have a direct quote here from doctor
Speaker 1: Benjamin Simon, and that is quote, neither patient is psychotic,
Speaker 1: and both consciously and under hypnosis told what they believed
Speaker 1: to be the absolute truth.
Speaker 2: The truth is what he believes to be the truth.
Speaker 1: And may not be consonant with the ultimate and non
Speaker 1: personal truth.
Speaker 2: Most frequently it.
Speaker 1: Is anyway, do you think that was pathologicalized of their experience?
Speaker 2: Do you think that?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And this is one of the major kind of
Speaker 3: stories of the threads that run through my book generally right,
Speaker 3: is that you see the Hills have this experience, and
Speaker 3: the Hills were in nineteen sixty, before this event happens,
Speaker 3: they were very much I think typical Americans, which is
Speaker 3: to say, Americans in nineteen sixteen generally trusted experts. It
Speaker 3: seems incredible to us now, but Gallop Poles in that
Speaker 3: period in the early sixties showed that upward of seventy
Speaker 3: five percent of Americans said they trusted the government to
Speaker 3: do the right thing seventy five percent, which seems bizarre
Speaker 3: to us now. The Hills then thought that when they
Speaker 3: went to the military would help them. The Hills believed
Speaker 3: that psychiatrists, that doctors would believe them and help them
Speaker 3: as well. And when Benjamin Simon told them that he
Speaker 3: did not think that this event actually happened, they were
Speaker 3: horrified and angry. And I think it is fair to
Speaker 3: say whether or not you think Benjamin Simon was right
Speaker 3: that the abduction did not happen, and many people, I
Speaker 3: think even Donald Piho frankly actually said later he did
Speaker 3: not think the abduction happened as the Hills were called it.
Speaker 3: Jacques Vala did not think that the induction happened as
Speaker 3: the Hills described it either. Valet says that in his diaries,
Speaker 3: I think it's fair to say that Benjamin Simon treated
Speaker 3: them much like many doctors treated patients in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 3: which is to say, I am right, you are wrong.
Speaker 3: Your job as a patient needs to do what I
Speaker 3: say and believe what I say. He was I think
Speaker 3: undeniably condescending toward them. He says later in some letters
Speaker 3: that he trades with Philip Klass, who's one of the
Speaker 3: great debunkers of the late twentieth injury. Simon tells class
Speaker 3: that I didn't want to have an argument with Betty
Speaker 3: because Betty was just woefully unequipped to deal with me.
Speaker 3: That I'm so much more educated than she was, an
Speaker 3: argument with her would have served no purpose whatsoever. So
Speaker 3: I think absolutely Simon treats him with condescension. He doesn't really,
Speaker 3: I think, want to take them very seriously, and he
Speaker 3: and he is somewhat high handed with John Fuller as
Speaker 3: well when Fuller comes to him. And certainly there's been
Speaker 3: so much debate after as to the reliability of hypnosis.
Speaker 3: But I think the key at that point is that
Speaker 3: Simon simply, I think, did not really want to treat
Speaker 3: the Hills as though they were his intellectual equals, and
Speaker 3: he never really did.
Speaker 1: I know that he did a lot of what we
Speaker 1: call today ps PTSD, worked with World War two and
Speaker 1: Korean War and all that, but this was the first
Speaker 1: type of case that I think anyone had tried to
Speaker 1: treat as a professional and look into I don't know
Speaker 1: what I know that look just the part where he
Speaker 1: didn't think they were crazy.
Speaker 2: I think that's good. I mean, he took them.
Speaker 1: Seriously, that they believed that this happened to them at least,
Speaker 1: And that's the information that my producer when she actually
Speaker 1: talked to him personally, he said basically the same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that's true. He actually even wrote,
Speaker 3: and this is in John Fuller's papers, he sent a
Speaker 3: letter to Barney's insurance company saying much the same, right,
Speaker 3: that these people are not psychotic, right, they are not insane,
Speaker 3: they are not crazy. They have for Simon and Simon
Speaker 3: believed they had a traumatic experience, and under hypnosis they
Speaker 3: transformed this traumatic experience into this story of alien abduction.
Speaker 3: But that's something many people do. Simon was a Freudian
Speaker 3: somewhat in that sense, right, And we have what we
Speaker 3: have traumatic memories, we repressed them. They might emerge an
Speaker 3: odd in strange ways, and that's what Simon thought happened
Speaker 3: to the Hills.
Speaker 1: So I guess I want to ask you what do
Speaker 1: you feel was in general? What are your personal feelings
Speaker 1: of the case itself. Do you think that this their
Speaker 1: account did happen in some type of way.
Speaker 3: I think, and I reflect a little bit about this.
Speaker 3: At the end of the book and the conclusion, I
Speaker 3: think they saw something strange on the road. I think
Speaker 3: that whatever it was they saw, it was something that
Speaker 3: alarmed them and distressed them. There was a lot of
Speaker 3: folks who tried to explain what it was they saw.
Speaker 3: That it might have been Jupiter, for instance, or maybe
Speaker 3: it was a tram that used to run up and
Speaker 3: down Cannon Mountain, and I don't find those explanations very convincing.
Speaker 3: I don't know what it was they saw. I think
Speaker 3: it was something that alarmed them and distressed them. Betty Hill,
Speaker 3: right after the sighting, said to Barney, I think that
Speaker 3: was a flying saucer, And she asked, Barty, do you
Speaker 3: believe in flying saucers? Out that we've seen one? And
Speaker 3: I think she went to that term flying saucer because
Speaker 3: it was a term that had become famous in the
Speaker 3: media in the nineteen fifties, and then that was the
Speaker 3: language that she could reach to try to explain what
Speaker 3: this weird thing in the sky was. So I think
Speaker 3: I have no idea what it was they saw in
Speaker 3: the sky. It was something strange and something that alarmed them.
Speaker 3: I do believe that I said the abduction itself, as
Speaker 3: I read all of the kind of accounts and the
Speaker 3: discussions of the story as it emerged, I found myself,
Speaker 3: I think, most sympathetic with what Jacques Vlet concluded, right
Speaker 3: Valais said, I think something strange happened to them. I
Speaker 3: think the memories that they recovered of what Valat calls
Speaker 3: in his journal the sort of like crude medical experimentation,
Speaker 3: and the conversations that Betty had with this alien creature who,
Speaker 3: if you believed the star map said he came from
Speaker 3: Zeta Reticuli, Valai didn't buy that, and I'm on board
Speaker 3: with him. Now, that's not the same thing as saying
Speaker 3: that something odd with non human intelligence did not happen
Speaker 3: to them. It is to say that Vlai did not
Speaker 3: believe that the memories as they recovered were accurate memories
Speaker 3: of what had actually happened to them. And I think
Speaker 3: I'm in that camp as well. I think something strange
Speaker 3: happened to the Hills. I'm not sure I can describe
Speaker 3: what it was. I'm not sure they even really had
Speaker 3: a firm grasp on what it was, and that there's
Speaker 3: all sorts of kind of complicated issues of memory and
Speaker 3: hypnosis that ultimately veil for us what actually happened that night.
Speaker 1: I've talked to a number of people over the years.
Speaker 1: This is I think this is show seven seventy four,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of A and B shows, so
Speaker 1: it's probably closeer to eight hundred shows that I've talked
Speaker 1: to people over the years, and some of the things
Speaker 1: that happened with Betty and Barney Hill, other people have
Speaker 1: claimed to have happened to them. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've ever looked into other cases like the Pasca Gula
Speaker 1: incident where and the alleg Ash incident where these people
Speaker 1: are basically and in a way it would make sense
Speaker 1: like if we were being examined, would be examined in
Speaker 1: the ways that they know, tend to talk about or
Speaker 1: they did talk about, I should say, examined physically by
Speaker 1: whatever it is. I can't say for sure if it's
Speaker 1: from another world or what.
Speaker 2: I have no clue.
Speaker 1: I don't claim to say that's from another world, extraterrestrial.
Speaker 1: I don't really know, but I do believe that. So
Speaker 1: you look at the I don't want to say consistent stories,
Speaker 1: but there are stories along the way. When there's also
Speaker 1: I mentioned just a second ago the allegash incident and
Speaker 1: Jack I think it is Jack or Jim is one
Speaker 1: of the people in that involved in that and basically
Speaker 1: saying he was He claims that he was shown some
Speaker 1: type of star map as well. So as it goes along,
Speaker 1: now that could someone could argue and say that's just
Speaker 1: like the influence of pop culture or someone looking into
Speaker 1: it and they're influenced by that. But I think it's interesting.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting case. I wish there was and as
Speaker 1: for all all cases, I wish there was more evidence
Speaker 1: that we we could have and at this point that's
Speaker 1: what we're lacking. And we have to listen to these
Speaker 1: people that go through these traumatic events and that the
Speaker 1: whole other thing here is we can get into but
Speaker 1: we were at the end of our show here, but
Speaker 1: these people that claim their experiences, I can't imagine what
Speaker 1: that would be like it's true, what's happening to them?
Speaker 3: And yeah, and to that point, I think one of
Speaker 3: the major influences of the Betty and Barney Hill case,
Speaker 3: so we haven't mentioned yet, is that eventually, when Betty
Speaker 3: and Barney Hill come out of the shypnosis, they don't
Speaker 3: actually and this is I think fascinating. They don't describe
Speaker 3: the creatures in their hypnosis trainscripts with Benjamin Simon. That
Speaker 3: comes later when they start telling people what these beings
Speaker 3: look like, and most famously they tell their artist friend
Speaker 3: David Baker, who does these charcoal sketches, and the creatures
Speaker 3: that they describe are small, with large eyes slanted upward,
Speaker 3: gray skin, big heads, hairless. Right, that have really become
Speaker 3: the paradigm for what we today call the grays. Right.
Speaker 3: The Hills were the first to describe extraterrestrial creatures in
Speaker 3: that way, and that's gradually become the paradigm that goes
Speaker 3: all the way well through a course through my books
Speaker 3: like Communion right, but also as I say, the but
Speaker 3: Hopkins books and such like and so forth. So in
Speaker 3: so many ways, the Hill's story has become the blueprint
Speaker 3: for what has happened since now. Whether that be as
Speaker 3: you say, because of the influence of media and just
Speaker 3: because of how famous the Hills's case became, there may
Speaker 3: be something to that, right, And that would be something
Speaker 3: I think that Jacques Valet might say when lat makes
Speaker 3: his argument that these creatures or this intelligence or whatever
Speaker 3: it may be, right shows it shows itself to us
Speaker 3: in ways that we will find meaningful and persuasive and convincing. Right,
Speaker 3: Perhaps that's what's going on, and perhaps these are creatures
Speaker 3: from Zeta articulate that built spaceships and flu here, which
Speaker 3: is what Benny and Barty Hill I think believed until
Speaker 3: the day they die. Right. What really interests me is
Speaker 3: how these different stories gain steam and gain influence and
Speaker 3: become paradigms for people trying to explain what ultimately are
Speaker 3: at their core. I think experiences that we have trouble describing,
Speaker 3: biences that we don't know how to explain, and thus
Speaker 3: we reach for tools to try to put meaning onto
Speaker 3: stuff that's fundamentally to use a kind of religious studies
Speaker 3: term numinis, which is to say somewhat beyond language.
Speaker 2: Wow, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: So do you have any other things that you would
Speaker 1: be writing about any other cases or is this just
Speaker 1: like a one off type of situation.
Speaker 3: No, it is not. I'm actually I am looking actually
Speaker 3: continuing to work in this area. I'm working right now
Speaker 3: on a man named Paul Solom who is not well
Speaker 3: known today, but two claimed to have had an experience
Speaker 3: for the UFO in Idaho, in nineteen forty eight and
Speaker 3: to have telepathic contact with it, and who then eventually
Speaker 3: by fifteen years later is living on the Healthier Reservation
Speaker 3: in northern Arizona and telling the Hopey people that UFOs
Speaker 3: were piloted by kin to Native Americans who were coming
Speaker 3: back to Earth to inaugurate the kind of transformative global
Speaker 3: not sae apocalypse and massive has kind of spiritual rebirth
Speaker 3: in the entire world. And I find him really interesting
Speaker 3: the part because, of course, as you mentioned earlier, I'm
Speaker 3: a professor of religious studies, and I'm especially write a
Speaker 3: lot about Mormonism when Paul Solan was a Mormon, and
Speaker 3: he has drawn a lot of Mormon imagery, a lot
Speaker 3: of Mormon mythology, a lot of Mormon mythoughs, and then
Speaker 3: combining it with the UFO conversations of the nineteen fifties
Speaker 3: and nineteen sixties, and then bringing all of that to
Speaker 3: Native Americans. So there's a lot going on there as well.
Speaker 3: But that is the book I'm currently working on.
Speaker 1: Wow, that sounds fascinating. I have to have you back
Speaker 1: for that one, I hope.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so thank you.
Speaker 1: And the book is The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, Alien,
Speaker 1: Counter civil Rights, and the New Age in America by
Speaker 1: right here, Matthew Brown. Thanks so much, Matthew, I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: All right, take care, all right everyone, so don't forget
Speaker 2: to come back.
Speaker 1: Next Tuesday we have Christopher Noel on consciousness in UFOs
Speaker 1: and then Jacques Frolet on Thursday. Both shows are at
Speaker 1: eight pm. Thanks so much, and remember to keep your
Speaker 1: eyes to the sky.