He follows this with Jose Parra’s sighting of six small hairy creatures by a saucer and they’re transfixing him with a bright light. [24] In Betty Hill’s nightmare she must fight for consciousness and she finds herself surrounded by four short men. Barney is unconscious and is being dragged by another group of men. They numbered eight to eleven when standing in the middle of the road.
They are taken from the car to a glowing saucer-shaped craft. The behavior of the aliens is very professional and businesslike and they are dressed in somewhat military style. They are not frightening per se. This is very much in keeping in tone with Keyhoe’s speculations that aliens were making a scientific study of the planet out of “neutral curiosity’ or as a prelude to a mass landing.[25]
This takes us up to the saucer, but it doesn’t give us many ideas what should take place inside. Neutral curiosity would probably lead to some sort of examination or questioning and this pretty much does happen. Yet there is that terror of the needle in the navel and the business with the star map. Nothing in Keyhoe predisposes one to those sorts of things.
Movies provide another cultural source of expectations and imagery. Bullard himself notes a pair of movies from the fifties have medical motifs in an alien abduction setting: “Invaders from Mars” (1953) and “Killers from Space” (1954). Though he understands the significance of the second one on some abduction cases subsequent to the Hills, he overlooked the significance of “Invaders From Mars”.[26]
Near the climax of the film a woman and a boy are abducted by
mutants from Mars and taken to a room within a saucer. The woman
is placed on a rectangular table which slides into the scene. She
struggles briefly till a light shines on her face which causes
her to relax and lose consciousness. A needle surrounded for part
of its length by a clear plastic sheath is aimed at the back of
her neck. A device at the end of the needle is going to be
surgically implanted there.[27]
In “The Interrupted Journey” we are dealing with a woman and a
man abducted by aliens described as mongoloid – itself a type of
mutation. In the original nightmare Betty compares the noses of
the aliens to Jimmy Durante. This is a very apt description of
the noses of the mutants in “Invaders From Mars”. Barney, oddly,
didn’t see the Durante noses of the aliens. Perhaps it was in
deference to Barney’s on-the-scene memories that this detail was
edited out by Betty in her hypnosis sessions. It may also be that
the big nose prompted jokes after the speeches she gave and her
unconscious took the opportunity to remove the annoying detail
when Benjamin Simon unleashed it.[28]
There are some preliminary tests of a routine sort. Betty then lies down on an examining table. Needles are placed on various parts of her body including the back of the neck. Then appears a very long needle, longer than any needle she’s seen before, and it is placed into her navel. She experiences great pain. The examiner puts his hand over her eyes, rubs, and the pain stops. The parallel to the calming light in “Invaders from Mars” is readily apparent.
I am indebted to Al Lawson for calling attention to the fact that
the needle-in-the-navel motif owes its origin to imagery
appearing during the Martian operating room episode. Shortly
after the operation begins, the camera cuts to a high-angle view
of the surgical theatre. At least, that is what it is supposed to
be. The image has an ambiguous character in terms of scale and
content.
You are supposed to interpret it as a view of the architecture of the interior of the saucer with the dominant structure being a tubular metal beam or conduit connecting ceiling to floor. It bears a stylistic similarity to the neck implanter in having a clear plastic sheath surrounding the upper half of its length. The ambiguity of the image, however, admits an alternative interpretation.
The tubular metal beam and plastic sheath becomes a hypodermic needle. Lighting of the floor suggests the curvature of an abdomen. The place where the floor and tube intersects is surrounded by a round indentation. It’s the navel. In the brief snatch of time the image is seen, some people will miss the intended interpretation and see a huge hypodermic needle has been thrust into the woman’s navel.
Some have seen Betty Hill’s needle-in-the-navel incident as revealing a medical procedure that did not exist at the time of the encounter. In fact the aliens’ reference to the procedure as a pregnancy test is quite contemporary for the period. Amniocentesis has existed as a medical procedure since the late l9th century. Back then the needle was inserted in the abdomen to draw off amniotic fluid when there was too much pressure during a pregnancy.
In the late 1950s, however, it became a testing procedure to monitor preganacies of women with Rh-negative blood who might have blood group incompatibility. Subsequent to 1966 amniocentesis became a genetic screening procedure. Comparison of Mrs. Hill’s ordeal to laparoscopy procedures suffers in the details.[29]
There is no conference with the aliens in “Invaders from Mars” and you might not expect the star map scene to originate there, but dreams have an odd penchant for distortion and condensation of memory materials. Earlier in the movie the boy and woman have a meeting with a scientist at an observatory. This character, Dr. Kelson, has a large star map on the wall behind him. He points at the map during this meeting and discusses the proximity of Mars to Earth. The most striking thing about this discussion, to the alert movie-goer, is that, while he points to the map as though these two planets are represented on it, in fact there is nothing there where the Earth should be. Kelson is faking it.