Episode 30: Alien Greys – What the Hills Saw, What We Remembered

Listen to learn more about:

• How the Hills were allegedly hypnotized and tested by otherworldly beings

• How people use the trauma of others to gain fame and profit.

• How fact and fiction merge when our minds want to make sense of the universe. 

SOURCES

This is the My Dark Path podcast.

The first chapter of my second novel, A Sickness in Time, opens in the White Mountain National Forest, a massive preserve of trees, mountains, and wildlife in New Hampshire and Maine. 100 miles of the northernmost parts of the Appalachian Trail cross through this forest, where the winds on the mountaintops can reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour. In my book, an Air Force veteran, looking for peace after a traumatic experience during their service, is camping in these mountains when they stumble upon a mysterious marker, which turns out to be a message sent back through time from a dark version of our future.

I love writing about New England almost as much as I love visiting it – we live in such a young country, and New England is one of the places where you can get the strongest sense of seeing history and touching it.

If you were coming up to camp in this forest from, say, Boston, you’d probably take Interstate 93, which allows you to swiftly travel between some of the major towns in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. But if you wanted to make the trip a little more adventurous, you might take the older path that snakes back and forth along the route of I-93. This older route, really a connection of multiple roads, has the formal name of US Route 3, but the parts of it near White Mountain National Forest are also known as the Daniel Webster Highway, named for the legendary attorney, statesman, and Member of Congress from New Hampshire.

And if you were traveling along Daniel Webster Highway, outside the town of Lincoln, you might pass a by a humble sign planted in the roadside – one of many historical markers that dot our roads. This one, though, is worth pulling over for; because it’s not there to commemorate the birthplace of a famous citizen, or a memorable moment in the Revolutionary War. This marker on the Daniel Webster Highway identifies the spot where, in September of 1961, the married couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced an incident which became famous nationwide – the first widely-reported story in American history of someone claiming to be abducted by a UFO.

Whatever you think about the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors, the Hill incident played an outsized role in shaping our collective ideas about flying saucers and the encounters people claim to have in them. But it’s not nearly as well known as Roswell unless you’re immersed in alien culture. So it’s illuminating to walk the dark path back to this grassy spot alongside the highway, and consider what the Hills saw, and what stories have been told about it ever since.

***

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and welcome to Season Two of the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal. So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. We hope you’ll check us out on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or just send an email to us at explore@mydarkpath.com. And now in 2022 we’re launching our Patreon, where subscribers will have access to exclusive full episodes starting with our special miniseries, a My Dark Path tour of history, science, and the paranormal in Cold War Moscow.

Finally, thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with Episode 4 of Season 2: Alien Greys: What the Hills Saw, What We Remembered.

***

PART ONE

What does an alien look like? It’s kind of a funny question, but funnier still is the thought that we have an answer for it. If you asked most Americans to picture a visitor from outer space, they might respond with a favorite fictional alien from Star Trek or Star Wars, but what if you followed up? No no, you might ask, what does a real alien look like? You probably know what is going to be described next – a hairless being, smaller than an average human adult, with a large, bulbous head, grayish or gray-green skin, and solid black eyes.

These are the aliens we saw in The X-Files, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the striking cover of the best-selling book Communion, in which author Whitley Streiber described his alleged encounter with unknown visitors. In August of 1995, the Fox Network aired a sensational TV special called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? The centerpiece of the special was a dark, blurry, 17-minute film which purported to depict a medical examination of an alien recovered from a UFO crash at Roswell in 1947. I’ve offered my own opinions about Roswell in a previous episode.

The Alien Autopsy special interviewed UFO experts, Hollywood special effects artists, and others, and claimed to take a neutral position on whether or not the footage was authentic. But here’s the problem – it later came out that the footage was clearly fraudulent, and that Fox had both rejected any opportunity to subject it to a serious examination and edited out interview segments where those movie special effects artists pointed out how strongly they believed it to be fake. Instead, the footage that remained made it sound like they were claiming it couldn’t be faked.

The so-called autopsy footage had come from a British record and movie producer named Ray Santilli, who claimed that he purchased it from a stranger in Cleveland whose name had to be kept in confidence, but who had been the actual Army photographer who documented the incident. Actual military photographers, it must be said, have to be much better at keeping a subject clearly framed and in-focus; or else they wouldn’t keep their jobs for very long.

The special included a supposed interview with this Army photographer; later, it was revealed that he was actually a homeless person they had paid to pose as this photographer. When confronted with these incongruities, Santilli admitted that the footage was staged, that he had hired a crew in a warehouse to build a fake alien corpse filled with sheep brains and raspberry jam. But, he claimed, he only had to do this because most of the real footage had decayed, and he was simply re-creating it exactly. He even claimed that some frames of the film were from the original 1947 footage. Of course, he never said which frames, and despite a standing offer from a Kodak laboratory, he never allowed it to be examined.

It’s clear that the Fox Network had every opportunity to know that this was a hoax, but decided that they’d rather not know and put it on the air anyway. And they were certainly rewarded with good ratings.

This is the sort of thing that inspires passionate conversations over here with the My Dark Path team. It’s been one of our fundamental goals before we even started drafting our first episode. We are fascinated by these stories, and are truly curious and inspired by them. Like Mulder on The X-Files – we want to believe. But, like Scully from the same show, we don’t want to take the easy way out, passing along gossip, hyping it to the roof, and shrugging our shoulders about whether it’s true or not. When it comes to hidden history, the paranormal, there’s a line where what we know and what we can verify stops, and the guesswork begins. The guesses are fascinating, thought-provoking, sometimes awe-inspiring. But we never want to lose sight of that line.

What’s most interesting about this incident is that, by the time Ray Santilli was building his fake alien corpse, he had set himself up for this whole bluff to succeed. And it’s because the corpse he built was the one I described – gray skin, black eyes, small hairless body, and bulbous head. People bought into the lie, in part, because he made an alien that looked like what we think aliens look like. How did that happen?

***

Memory is a far more complicated thing than we generally assume. We’re still just scratching the surface of understanding how the human brain stores and retrieves knowledge and details of past experiences. One thing that we are starting to understand, though, is that people are not perfect, neutral stenographers. It is possible for us to forget or ignore important details, only to remember them later. It is even possible, with enough effort, for a false memory to take hold, for our brain to conjure new details in order to fill in gaps, and have those false details subsequently feel as real as everything which actually happened. As we examine the story of the Hills, this is vital to remember, because it may explain how the story which has evolved about an incident that happened in 1961 might have been influenced by a TV show which didn’t air until 1964, three years later.

Let me offer one opinion that I have strong confidence in – I do not believe that Barney or Betty Hill had any ambition to being famous UFO abductees. Until that night in September of 1961, I think they just wanted to live their lives out of the spotlight. And I think everything after was shaped by their drive to understand what happened. There’s an 1891 science fiction book called Meda: A Tale of the Future, written by Kenneth Folingsby. We’re going to come back to this book, but this opening passage seems uncannily appropriate:

“HOW curious are the incidents that occur in all lives, and how often is it that the most important amongst them may take its rise in the merest trifle!

In looking backward on a life's history we find that our most important actions have been influenced and our life's path determined by an accident.”

Betty Hill was a social worker with a degree from the University of New Hampshire; she worked on emotionally-exhausting child welfare cases. Barney was a World War II veteran who worked for the Postal Service. They were an interracial couple at a time when this was still illegal in many American states; but despite the prejudice they faced, they were a stable couple, active in their community. They were members of the NAACP, attended a local Unitarian Church, and Barney worked with the Civil Rights Commission. They lived in Portsmouth, which is a little over a 100 miles from that marker on the Daniel Webster Highway. On the night of September 19th, 1961, they were driving home in their 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air from a visit to Montreal. It was a spontaneous road trip – a quick substitute for the honeymoon they’d never had time for.  They were hours from home, and fighting exhaustion, but determined to make it back rather than look for a motel. There was a report that bad weather was coming, and they hadn’t brought a lot of money with them.

What happened next…we don’t know. And when the Hills got home, they couldn’t remember. Everything which follows represents an effort to remember, and understand, what fragments of memory they did have.

They remember seeing a strange light or lights in the sky, moving in ways that didn’t make sense to them. And, despite their fatigue, they were curious enough to pull over and investigate. Barney, a cautious man in a violent time, remembers retrieving a handgun he kept under the seat. He also brought out a pair of binoculars to look at the light. They resumed their drive, watching the progress of the light as they continued. They wondered if it was following them.

Here is where things become more vague – memories of the light obstructing them in the road, forcing them to stop. Of a fiery red orb hovering near the ground. Of seeing figures in blue or black uniforms, of Barney feeling a sudden terror that the figures were here to kidnap Betty and himself. An attempt to flee in their car, and a sudden, overwhelming buzzing and beeping sound that brought their memories to a sudden stop.

They regained consciousness in their car, 35 miles away; and two hours had passed.

When they reached home at dawn, there were unexplainable mysteries – Barney’s shoes were scuffed in unusual places. Betty’s dress was frayed and ripped, and had a mysterious powder on it. Their watches didn’t work anymore, the strap of Barney’s binoculars was broken; and the trunk of their car had a series of shiny circles on it.

I want to stop here for a minute and point out that, so far, there’s not much to debunk in this story. There are earthly explanations for everything described. But we want to step carefully here, because the chronology of what happens next is crucial if we’re going to gauge the credibility of the story which has grown up around this incident.

The Hills had made it home. It was dawn on September the 20th. Both were out of sorts and behaving strangely. Extreme sleep deprivation could do that to you. They felt like it was very important to shower. They had no idea what happened; nor why their memories were missing. But they felt a natural distress, and a hope that they could get those memories back. And that strong, shared memory of the light that seemed to follow them was a good place to start.

The next day, September 21st, they contacted the local Air Force Base. They provided a statement; but this is important – they only discussed the light and how it moved in the sky. Nothing about human-like figures. Later, the Hills would say simply that they didn’t want to sound like crackpots, so they held back some of the more vague and strange details.

This report was forwarded to Project Blue Book, the government program tasked with investigating the plausibility of UFO sightings. Their analysis of the incident was labeled “inconclusive”, lacking enough information to develop a strong working theory for what the Hills saw. It might have been the planet Jupiter, which was visible that night. It might have been a searchlight. It might have been a signal tower on top of Cannon Mountain – a 4,000-foot peak which the Hills drove right by. The “fiery red orb” they described seeing on the ground might have been the giant, illuminated Jack O’Lantern that glowed near the highway at night to advertise a local motel. Several years ago, Betty’s sister had claimed to see a UFO in the sky, and Betty began to check UFO books out of the local library, but the Hills weren’t convinced yet. They didn’t see themselves as the type of people to believe in aliens. They just wanted to know what happened.

She wrote a letter to the author of one of these UFO Books – a retired Marine Corps Major named Donald Keyhoe. At the time, he was the head of NICAP – the National         Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Think of them as a sort of civilian equivalent to Project Blue Book, investigating UFO reports open-mindedly, but with a degree of skepticism and scientific rigor. In UFO circles they had a reputation for trying to build respect for their field of research, for not falling too easily for sensationalism.

In her letter, sent less than a week after the incident, Betty mentions that her husband and herself are considering undergoing hypnosis in an attempt to recover their memories.

Then, roughly ten days after the incident, Betty Hill started to have a series of intense, recurring nightmares. They lasted for five straight nights; and even though they abruptly ended, Betty was fixated on them, wondering if they were connected to their lost memories.

In late October, just over a month after their road trip, the Hills sat for a long interview with Walter Webb, a Boston astronomer and member of NICAP who had read their letter. This time, the Hills expanded on their story, including many details from Betty’s dreams. Webb concluded that, while there were fantastical details, that the Hills were earnest and credible witnesses; showing none of the signs of magical thinking or desire for attention that characterized many of the people who share UFO stories.

After the meeting with Webb, Betty decided to write down everything she could remember of those dreams in a diary. This is where we can trace many of the accounts and explanations that follow – to these recollections of a nightmare.

The figures Betty describes, in many ways, aren’t the alien greys of popular culture. In her diary, she describes them as having grey skin, and being smaller than average people; but she also described dark hair, blue lips, and, quote, “Jimmy Durante noses” – referring to the late comic actor famous for the prominence of that facial feature.

In her dream, the Hills were stopped by a roadblock, and forced by these figures in their blue uniforms to walk through the woods. She remembers seeing her husband and trying to call out to him, but that he appeared to be sleepwalking.

And now is where the story takes a definitive turn towards the otherworldly. In her journal about her recurring nightmare, she describes being led up a ramp, into a disc-shaped flying machine, filled with more of these short, gray beings. She describes being separated from Barney, being subjected to a series of medical examinations; including a needle plunged painfully into her stomach. The aliens described the needle as a pregnancy test.

Despite all this invasive activity, Betty also remembers the alien visitors as being polite and communicative; somehow able to send her telepathic messages that she understood. When she asked where they had come from, the leader showed her a star chart. They even offered to loan her one of their books, though they changed their mind and took this gift back before letting her go.

And before they departed, they told Betty Hill that they had altered her memory so that neither she nor her husband would ever know that this had happened.

***

PART TWO

“They were not more than four feet high, with very large heads, and small bodies and limbs…the skin was clear almost to transparency.”

Those words are from that science fiction book I mentioned earlier, Meda: A Tale of the Future, by Kenneth Folingsby. It doesn’t have very high status in the canon of scifi – the plot involves a man who collapses from overwork, and in his dreamstate is flung thousands of years into the future; where he encounters humans of the 56th century. For the most part, the book is a dialogue about what the author saw as the backwards ways of the 19th century, and the more enlightened ways of the future. Kenneth Folingsby, to his credit, was already talking about the advantages of solar power over fossil fuels in 1891.

The primary reason the book is noteworthy is in his description of these futuristic humans – with their exaggerated skulls and shorter bodies. It’s one of the first times we can find someone imagining a form of humanity distorted in this way – like us enough to seem familiar, but exaggerated in these otherworldly details. The book is set in futuristic Scotland, by the way, so these aren’t aliens – they refer to themselves as Scotonians. And they even have their own flying saucer – what the narrator describes as an oval-shaped flying machine built from science far beyond his understanding.

Just a few years later, H.G. Wells wrote his classic novel The Time Machine, in which the human race of the future has been divided into two species – the Eloi who live a naïve and pleasure-filled existence on the surface, and the Morlocks, who live in the darkness underground, and are secretly responsible for feeding and clothing the Eloi, whom they raise in order to eat.

The Morlocks, in the original book, are described as being smaller than the time traveling main character, and having pale, white or gray skin, with oversized eyes. There’s a pseudoscientific rationale behind this, Wells imagined it as the natural outcome of evolution for people living underground for hundreds of thousands of years.

The job of a storyteller is often to imagine things that resonate with their audience, trying to tap into subconscious fears and desires. It’s like the strange but wonderful mystery of how so many global cultures have their own legends about dragons, myths that seem to have developed completely independently of one another. Something imaginary can feel very real if it taps into that imagery of the unconscious.

Now, I don’t think that Barney or Betty Hill read this obscure 19th century book about future Scotland. But the relationship between the UFO community and storytelling artists is a deep and influential one. I told you that Betty Hill read a book on UFO’s by Donald Kehoe. It’s one of his books which was served as the basis for a 1956 scifi movie called Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. In that film, the aliens are mostly concealed by what they describe as their life support suits, but when we see the head of a dead one, it shares many details with the popular image of the Alien Gray – hairless, earless, with oversized eyes and a prominent skull, suggesting a disproportionately large brain. Hollywood filmmakers and special effects technicians were now actively involved in trying to find a visual representation we could all agree on; an alien that felt right to us, subconsciously. The human mind is a funny thing – it’s able to accept a completely fantastical explanation, provided that the answer satisfies its needs.

Barney and Betty Hill needed an answer to what happened during those missing hours, and why Betty was having nightmares. And so, they kept searching.

***

Later that November, they sat for another long interview with representatives from NICAP. C.D. Jackson and Robert E. Hohmann had reviewed the tapes of the initial conversation, and now they wanted to go deeper, trying to pin down details of timing and location. How many hours had the Hills lost, exactly? Where is the last place they can verifiably remember being? It turns out, they didn’t have a lot of information for either question. Again, the talk turned to hypnosis, and the possibility that it could unlock some memories for Betty.

The Hills started taking road trips back along the route to the White Mountains whenever they had the time; hoping that they could trigger some memories by it; or at least have some more confidence about where they had first seen the mysterious light which prompted them to pull over.

The mystery was continuing to cause stress and agitation for both of them; but their story was still largely a private one. It wasn’t until March of 1963, a year and a half later, that they finally spoke publicly. They told a group at their church. It was also through their church that they met Air Force Captain Ben Swett, who had some experience with hypnosis, and eventually referred them to a specialist in Boston who was willing to try and help.

Then, in November of 1963, the Hills told their story to a local UFO group in Massachusetts; and this choice, though they didn’t know it at the time, was going to turn their quiet search for answers turned into a public spectacle.

In early 1964, they had their first hypnosis sessions with Dr. Benjamin Simon. Like the interviewers from NICAP, Dr. Simon felt as though the Hills were sincere in their belief in what they had experienced; that they wouldn’t be misleading with their answers. In order to obtain more trustworthy results, he conducted their sessions separately; looking for places where their stories matched or separated.

In the two and a half years since the incident, some of the order of the events, and the description of the mysterious figures, had changed from Betty’s initial dreams and her descriptions of them in her journal. And yet her descriptions and Barney’s descriptions were largely consistent with one another. What does that mean? Does it mean that hypnosis was unlocking buried truth, a more accurate accounting of events than Betty’s dreams? Or does it mean that two years of a husband-and-wife talking about this incident had solidified a shared narrative that lived in their deep, long-term memory?

The story now involved a saucer-shaped craft – and Barney seeing the alien figures looking at him through the windows of that craft. And while the Hills did try to flee in their car, they now feel that the aliens somehow controlled Barney’s body, making him steer the car back to where they could be taken aboard the UFO.

In Barney’s sessions, he added a noteworthy detail to his description of the aliens. He now had intense memories of their eyes, which he felt were pressing into his, seeing into his innermost thoughts. The aliens, he now said, were hairless, earless, noseless, but their eyes were extra-large, slanted and so wide they reached around the sides of their heads.

Remember the description of the figures in Betty Hill’s dream journal – those aliens had dark hair and Jimmy Durante noses. When and how did they change? There’s no way to prove a connection, but an article in the Skeptical Inquirer Magazine in the 1990’s noted a remarkable coincidence. Just 12 days before Betty and Barney Hill’s first hypnosis session, the legendary scifi TV show The Outer Limits aired an episode called “The Bellero Shield”, in which an alien arrives on Earth wielding advanced technology. And the alien has a face with no nose, no hair, and no ears, but large, slanted, wide eyes that stretch around its skull. At the time, there weren’t many depictions of aliens in either science fiction or UFO sightings that had these particular eyes. Betty Hill was asked once about this coincidence, and said only that she had never heard of The Outer Limits.

***

In October of 1965, the private search for answers by the Hills turned public, against their will. Remember when I mentioned that they had described their experiences to a local UFO group. Almost two years after that speech, a reporter for the Boston Traveler named John Luttrell had acquired a tape recording of it, and while investigating the couple, also learned about their hypnosis sessions. He reached out to invite them to participate in the article he intended to write, but they refused. They even consulted with attorneys to see if they could block the story and protect their privacy. But they couldn’t. John Luttrell published his article under the sensational headline: “UFO Chiller: Did THEY Seize Couple?” And suddenly, everyone with an interest in UFOs wanted to talk to Betty and Barney Hill.

***

PART THREE

The Hills eventually decided that they needed to put their version of their story out into the world; to reclaim some control of the narrative. John Fuller was a playwright, journalist, and author who was already at work on a book investigating UFO sightings in New Hampshire, the so-called Exeter Incident. Like many of the characters we’ve met in this story, he considered himself a curious skeptic – hopeful of finding proof but not willing to abandon the principles of science and reason.

Together they produced a book called The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer. It remains one of the most influential publications in the history of American UFO study, pushing stories of alien abduction and medical experimentation into the mainstream. It was even adapted into a TV movie. Barney Hill was played by James Earl Jones. The Hills were now exactly what they had dreaded becoming – celebrities that everyone considered crackpots.

***

Sometimes in UFO circles, you’ll hear Alien Greys being described by another name – Zeta Reticulans. Zeta Reticuli is a binary star system about 40 light years from Earth; which many UFO enthusiasts believe is either the current or former home of these aliens. It turns out that this belief also connects back to the story of the Hills, and their hypnosis sessions with Dr. Simon. During those sessions, Betty recalled the alien leader showing her a star chart in an attempt to demonstrate where they came from. She described it as something that we might now understand as a kind of hologram or virtual reality – she said it was 3-dimensional, and changed perspective as she moved around it.

Dr. Simon suggested that she try to draw some of the most prominent stars from memory. Putting dots on a piece of paper without looking at it, she drew a kind of constellation, the shape of the brightest stars as she could find them in her memory.

The star map she created was included in John Fuller’s book, where it caught the attention of an Ohio schoolteacher and amateur astronomer named Marjorie Fish. Fish was fascinated by Betty Hill’s map, and wondered if it could be used to pinpoint the location of the aliens. She did intensive research, using the latest published catalogues of identified stars and their distances from the Earth. She used thread and beads to create three-dimensional models in her house; she even visited Betty Hill personally in an attempt to get more accurate information. And when her work was finished, she believed that the map not only suggested Zeta Reticuli as the home of the aliens, but that it identified a large number of stars of the right size to support life, all located in a network between their planet and ours, a kind of trade route of theoretical life-supporting worlds.

Fish presented the results of her studies to NICAP, and they brought it to a magazine which had launched just recently. Astronomy is a popular magazine among science enthusiasts to this day, and showed off some of the most widely-seen pictures from the legendary Voyager space probes; but when it debuted in 1973, it was a question whether or not it would find enough interested readers to stay in circulation. And maybe that pressure to attract readers, and that uncertainty about what sort of stories they would cover, led editor Terence Dickinson to personally write an article about Marjorie Fish’s star map.

The article could fit in a textbook as an example of confirmation bias, of working backwards from the desire to find something to be true. Piling conjectures on top of giant assumptions, Dickinson lends full support to the idea that this map, a series of dots drawn blindly under hypnosis, indeed matches the supposed locations of life-supporting stars clustered between ourselves and Zeta Reticuli; and that therefore, it was likely the home planet of the aliens.

Not long after this article, Terence Dickinson was fired as the editor of Astronomy magazine. These days, the staff refers to this as “The Zeta Ridiculi Incident”, a crippling blow to the credibility of the young magazine.

Research gradually uncovered that the star catalogs had many of their distance calculations wrong, that the binary stars were too close together to support biological life as we know it, and, on top of it all, no planets could be found in the Zeta Reticuli star system. No less an authority than the late Carl Sagan debunked Marjorie Fish’s map, noting that the stars in our sky appear in such number and variety that you could find a match in almost any random series of dots, if you wanted to see it badly enough.

Marjorie Fish did something both admirable and rare – she said she had been wrong; and disavowed the very map which had made her famous in UFO circles. That’s what science is supposed to do – let go of a theory when the evidence clearly refutes it. Nevertheless, the references to Zeta Reticuli persist in UFO narratives to this day.

***

PART FOUR

Barney Hill passed away in 1969. Later accounts of the life of Betty Hill describe her as going even deeper into her fixation on UFOs. She spoke extensively at UFO conventions about her continued investigations – one author claimed that she was going out on flying saucer hunts as many as three times a week, often bringing back blurry photographs of lighted blobs in the sky. She engaged in combative correspondence with authors and researchers who brought up inconsistencies or alternate explanations for her stories. In 1995, she self-published a follow-up book, in which she claimed to have seen entire squadrons of flying saucers in the sky, and a truck levitating over a freeway.

I’m not qualified to psychoanalyze a widow involuntarily experiencing the intoxicating effects of fame. Ever since her life was thrust into the spotlight by a journalist looking for a juicy headline, the UFO community contained the only people left who gave her any attention and credence; it was her best means of having importance and purpose. Dr. Benjamin Simon, under pressure for many years to make a statement about whether or not he believed his most famous patients, finally did an interview as the TV movie about the Hills was about to debut. In his opinion, the Hills definitely saw…something, which they could not identify. This is the basic definition of a UFO – an unidentified flying object. He believed that something which happened that night had produced a lingering trauma, and further, that the anxiety primarily lived in Betty, with her husband absorbing that anxiety out of empathy.

But as for the stories in her journal, Dr. Simon ultimately believed they were just that – that his hypnosis only drew out the details of a troubling dream. Maybe the dream represented an attempt by Betty Hill’s mind to fit an explanation to that missing time and those fragmented memories. But Dr. Simon did not believe that their hypnosis sessions constituted any kind of proof of alien life. In one of his letters, he claims that he had personally encountered UFOs twice, so he wasn’t opposed to the idea of their existence. But anyone who takes science seriously knows that you can’t play fast and loose with a word like “proof”. He had been a doctor trying to help emotionally-troubled patients find peace, full stop.

When I think back on an interracial couple traveling along a dark road late at night in the 1960’s, I don’t even need the presence of aliens in order to imagine some pretty frightening scenarios about being chased by lights, stopped by a roadblock, and losing consciousness while trying to flee a group of figures in the woods. The kind of encounter that could result in broken watches, scuffed clothing, and nightmares. In researching this episode, we didn’t find any references to such alternate theories, so I don’t want to dwell on them, it’s pure speculation. Sometimes, memory itself is a dark path, one that doesn’t always allow us to see how we got here from where we were before. The Hills had to drive the Daniel Webster highway multiple times, trying to jog their own memories, before finally naming the spot which is now commemorated in that roadside marker.

But Alien Greys just keep on appearing. Are any aspect of them based in reality? Or has the long cultural dialogue between scifi storytellers, our shared subconscious hopes and fears, and the burning need to put a face to the unexplained, produced this noseless, hairless, gray face, with its dark eyes and large skull, to stand in for that need until we know more? If we ever are definitively visited by aliens, wouldn’t it be an irony if we didn’t even recognize them, because they didn’t come in a flying saucer, and didn’t look the way we thought they would?

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host. I produce the show with Courtney and Eli Butler; and our creative director is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by our Senior Story Editor Nicholas Thurkettle, and our fact-checker Nicholas Abraham; big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.

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