Free Alien Universe by Don Lincoln Page A

five in the morning, some two hours after their expected arrival time.
    That’s the first part of the story. The rest is much weirder. However, this we will sketch in less detail. The reason is that the next chapter in the story developed slowly and after interaction with many people. The interested reader should read John Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey or Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden’s Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience .
    The Hills couldn’t account for the two hour gap in time. Betty talked to her sister, who had earlier reported a UFO encounter. Her sister spoke to a police captain, who suggested that Betty speak with the air force. Barney wanted nothing to do with it, but Betty called Pease Air Force Base and made a report. The next day, they were called back by the reporting officer who wanted to confirm some details. Barney started to warm up to the idea of talking to people about it.
    Betty’s curiosity about UFOs was stronger than before. She went to the library to find whatever she could, including The Flying Saucer Conspiracy by Major Donald Keyhoe. The thesis of the book was that either the UFO phenomenon was a mass hysteria, well worth study, or that it was real, which was more interesting still. Keyhoe found the second thesis more plausible and was convinced that the air force was covering up the many reports that they had received. Keyhoe’s book told many stories, including an abduction one (which will be relevant soon). Betty was interested enough that she wrote Keyhoe asking whether he had other writings she could read. Betty was hooked.
    With that fateful letter, Betty made herself known to the UFO world. Keyhoe.passed along the letter to a UFO researcher at the Hayden Planetarium. The researcher spoke to the Hills and wrote a report, which was submitted to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), an organization started by Keyhoe to investigate UFOs. Through these connections, the Hill story started becoming familiar to the community of UFO aficionados.
    It should be noted that the Hills were not media hounds. They didn’t talk to reporters. They spoke to governmental agencies and UFO investigators of the disciplined variety. The Hills wanted to know what happened to them. And, across the board, the really pressing question was “where did those two hours go?”
    About ten days or so after the incident, Betty started having vivid dreams that when she and Barney were outside the car, they were escorted into the saucer, where they underwent medical tests, including the insertion of a needle into her navel to test for pregnancy. The examiners were short, between 5’ and 5’4” tall. They were gray with bluish lips and huge noses “like Jimmy Durante.” They were very human in their appearance and dressed in military-style uniforms, with hats like those worn by the U.S. Air Force. She wrote the dreams down in November 1961.
    Quite aside from questions of UFOs, Barney was stressed. His job was on the south side of Boston, with a 120-mile daily commute, round trip. He worked the night shift and was unable to spend much time with his sons from his first marriage. In an effort to better cope with his stresses, Barney went into therapy. In late 1963, Air Force Captain Ben Swett, who the Hills met at a presentation at their church, suggested that they ask the therapist if hypnosis would help. The therapist referred the Hills to Dr. Benjamin Simon. When Simon spoke to Barney, it became obvious that the saucer encounter was causing Barney more problems than he would admit, so Simon decided to hypnotize Hill to perhaps understand what happened in the two hour gap. The hypnosis went on over a period of 11 months.
    Simon hypnotized both Barney and Betty separately to avoid contaminating their recollections. Barney went first. Under hypnosis, he remembered an encounter much like Betty’s dreams. This was two years after the incident, and Barney had no