BETTY HILL and her husband Barney were apparently abducted by the occupants of a UFO in September 1961. The event became the template for the ever more elaborate abduction claims that we hear today. But they don’t impress Betty Hill, as PETER BROOKESMITH discovered when he visited her at home in New Hampshire.
I’d heard about Betty’s acerbic opinions of the modern abduction phenomenon on the ufological grapevine. Naturally I wondered how far and in what ways we might agree. We talked a lot about cats (about 15 condescend to frequent her house) and politics and her own abduction, but her less than dewy-eyed approach to most of today’s abduction claims will probably surprise people more.
Those who promote the abduction phenomenon or, by their silence, do nothing to temper its excesses, do not amuse her though she chuckles a lot as she talks and never loses an opportunity to make a lightning-fast wisecrack. In 1995 she published A Common Sense Approach to UFOs, which tells of her long involvement in UFO and abduction investigation. “I have the feeling that most UFO organizations dislike my book,” she wrote to me before we met. “None of them have reviewed it.”
B: You must feel a certain amount of chagrin that this phenomenon has gone the way it has.
H: I try very hard not to have guilt feelings about the way stupid people have misinterpreted my experience. The reason I wrote this book was to try to get across to people that they should stay away from hypnosis. Don’t let anybody fool around in your brain. I mean, you have problems enough to live with yourself, without other people making their contribution.
The whole problem now is the lack of understanding of hypnosis. The first stage of hypnosis is one of suggestibility. It’s supposed to be useful to have a person lose weight, or help them cut down on smoking, or something like that. But if you say to a person, “You murdered someone!” in the first stage of hypnosis, they’re going to spend the rest of their lives looking for the body. And the same too, when somebody goes in for hypnosis for a UFO abduction, they’re going to get it (chuckles).
I can do hypnosis, and I can give you an abduction in 20 minutes. Sure I could. You can do it to anybody. See, what they use for hypnosis for abductions now is what we call ‘flight of fantasy’. I do it with whole groups. Put someone in a light trance, and give them the choice. You can go aboard a UFO, you can go back to a past life, you can take a quick trip around the galaxy, or you can go into the future. Ninety seven per cent will go back to a past life!
B: So you would trust an abduction account that came from medical hypnosis, but not one that comes from a lighter form of the technique the kind people like Hopkins and Jacobs and Mack use?
H: When people tell weird tales hallucinations, delusions, fantasy, dreams, something they’ve seen, heard or read when you rule out all of those, then you may have reality. And in working with people for years people would call me, particularly after they saw my movie, The UFO Incident, and say, “I think I’ve been abducted.”
And I’d say, “Well, you know, we really don’t know.” And I worked with these people, and we were able to pinpoint why they thought they’d been abducted when they had not been. As a result of this I was able to develop criteria to establish the real abductions from the fantasies. In this country, they say three million people have been abducted. Not once, but continuously. Do ‘you realize that means three or four thousand people every night are bring abducted? In this country alone? I don’t know how the planes get through.
Most abduction researchers and their supporters say that what they find must be real, because it’s consistent from witness to witness.
Of course it’s real to them because they tell ’em the same thing! You know those therapy groups? A woman called me. She quit. She said she got fed up. That therapy group it ends up in “I’ll show you the kind of sex I had on board the UFO if you show me the kind of sex you had on board the UFO.”
No matter what the subject is it’s “Me Too!” I call ’em the Me-Too People. Whereas every real abduction has been totally different. There are no duplications. Actually, the real abductions, you’ve never heard of. Because nobody’s writing any books about ’em. Most people who’ve been really abducted, have the same attitude Barney and I did. It was our experience and it was nobody else’s business. But then we got the publicity. But they have the same feeling. It’s something between them, and the UFOs.
B: If the kind of hypnosis that’s used is producing fantasies, why do you think people are having those particular fantasies?
H: Because the investigators are directing them to have those fantasies. They’re suggesting them to them. They’re very, very destructive people. They don’t care who they hurt to make people buy a book, to make some money. Okay I’ve been having contacts with this girl. Ten years old, she’s on vacation with her parents, and she goes for a walk in the woods. And she’s late getting back. Her parents are yelling to her, her brother’s yelling to her, and they’re saying, “Where have you been? We were ready to call out the police.” But she was just taking a walk in the woods.
Years later, she wondered: Did I get abducted by a UFO? Even though she didn’t see any UFOs. So she goes down and visits [a famous abduction researcher] for nine days. And during the nine days, she has all these abductees come in and tell her in great detail what happened to them on board the craft. And then he gave her hypnosis. Five tapes of abductions, beginning when she was three years old.
You know what happened next? She joined the Air Force. She’s been in the Air Force maybe about six months and they come out with handcuffs and a straitjacket and carry her off, to a mental hospital. Now she claims that somebody somewhere sent one of the tapes of her hypnosis to the Air Force. I doubt it. I think if they’d sent the tapes, they would have just called her in and questioned her. I think she was really bizarre. She’s been hallucinating ever since. She’s even married to an alien now. She’s had two fetuses taken. She can’t get a job and keep it. She doesn’t get along with anybody. She wrote a little booklet, but nobody will touch it because it’s exactly what everybody else is saying!…