We never heard Road Runner’s “Meep! Meep!” calling card but then again this was more of a Road Walker leisurely strolling across our bow in central New Mexico, where Lorrie and I were vacationing in the summer of 2000.
We saw Road Walker’s westerly gavotte as a sign to steer away from Roswell, thus nixing it from our New Mexico bucket list. In short order, the billboards for this UFO hot spot got cheesier with each passing twilight mile. No glow-in-the-dark pillows for us at the Alien Autopsy Motel.
My wife Lorrie is a Jersey Girl. She doesn’t do tents. She doesn’t do motels not listed in Frommer’s. I’m a “bloom where you are planted” kind of guy but Lorrie pitched a fit when we stopped the car to look at the map. “Well, here we are in Bum***k, New Mexico!” she yelled. “What the hell are we going to do now?”
The place of profanity turned out to be Corona, a single traffic-light outpost. The proprietor of the town’s lone restaurant attested to the kindness of strangers by opening up for us after closing time for a repast of burgers, billiards and Buddy Holly on the jukebox, gratis.
A faded newspaper clipping on the wall educated us as to the highly-publicized UFO crash in New Mexico on July 8, 1947. Whatever came from the sky alighted on Mac Brazel’s sheep ranch in Corona, not near the Broadway lights of Roswell 106 miles away. Corona doesn’t draw a single mention in 2023’s bulky tome UFO-The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here-and Out There, though Brazel is quoted on page one, describing the findings on his ranch as, “rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks.” Army Air Force Colonel William Blanchard, a B-29 bomber pilot in WWII and the backup to Colonel Paul Tibbets for the Hiroshima atomic bomb mission, walked Brazel’s property and saw the remains as something else. Brazel was repeatedly questioned and the “parts is parts” remains found on the ranch were whisked away to the U.S. Army Air Force base in Roswell. A military press release followed, claiming that the base had captured the first flying saucer.
Coronians prefer their low profile. Let Roswell push junky bendable spacemen and an eponymous TV series.
I’m not sold on the presence of Unidentified Anamalous Phenomenon (UAPs, the new term for UFOs) in what I viewed of the Pentagon’s recently declassified “dance like a butterfly” white dot videos. Is the Pentagon and Air Force’s gift designed to make the public disbelieve in UAPs? Is this the best they have? I was more entertained last week watching science teacher Ryland Grace fist-bump benevolent space traveler Rocky through the alien’s protective sphere eleven light years from earth in the brilliant Project Hail Mary.
The entertaining astrophysicist and UFO enthusiast Neil deGrasse Tyson saw more than I did in the declassified videos, but still he asked in a CNN interview, “Where’s the alien?”
Let’s leave bogus Roswell in the rear-view mirror and look at New Hampshire’s two key events that landed early on in the chronology of UAPs. These are impressively laid out in a pair of now pricey 1966 books by John G. Fuller titled The Interrupted Journey and Incident at Exeter (more on this in Part 2). The accomplished journalist spent considerable time in the Granite State interviewing all the principles of both events while also connecting with brass at Pease Air Force Base and checking out the pertinent topography. All told, he interviewed 60 Granite Staters, several detractors among them, for just the latter book. His study of what happened in Exeter became an article for Look magazine. Thorough. Captivating. Believable. The man did his homework.
The Interrupted Journey was the first complete telling of what allegedly happened to Portsmouth couple Betty and Barney Hill on the night of September 19-20, 1961 as they drove through Franconia Notch on their way home to Portsmouth from Montreal.
The timeline is important. Fuller first came to New Hampshire a month after the reported September 3, 1965, Kensington sighting of a hovering UAP at three a.m. by hitchhiking 18-year-old Norman Muscarello and Exeter police officers David Hunt and Eugene Bertrand. More on this later.
The Hills were first made aware of Fuller at this time, four years after their incredible experience in Franconia Notch. For fear of ridicule, they’d kept a lid on their story. Barney didn’t want public knowledge of the 1961 events to detract from his Civil Rights work. Yes, they did report their experiences to authorities in October, 1961. Their letter describing the presence of a UAP in Franconia Notch was soon forwarded to Walter Webb, a lecturer on the staff of Boston’s Hayden Planetarium and Scientific Advisor to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon (NICAP). Webb’s six-page letter to the U.S. Air Force only resulted in prolonged denial, dismissal, inane explanations, lying and obfuscation.
But much had changed in the Hills’ understanding of their experience between 1961 and 1965. The Hills underwent independent hypnosis from January to June, 1964, in the Boston office of psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, M.D. They gave permission for their sessions to be taped with the final part of their therapy integrating the dialogue on the tapes into a conscious understanding of what happened, a piece at a time, under Dr. Simon’s supervision. They wanted their experience told truthfully, not sensationally, and asked Dr. Simon to release the tapes to Fuller, a journalist they had read about and anticipated trusting.
The heart of The Interrupted Journey is reading the transcription of the tapes. The Hills originally presented to Dr. Hill with detailed and disturbing intense dreams and anxiety (Betty), and an ulcer, high blood pressure and PTSD (Barney). Dr. Simon’s goal of the Hills’ therapy was to address these symptoms, not to verify or disprove an alien abduction. Barney took a six-month leave of absence from his job at the Boston post office while the Hills worked with Dr. Simon. Their intent in seeking help was to feel better, not to wind up on the cover of the National Enquirer. Sadly, Barney would die of a stroke at age 46, likely never recovering from his PTSD.
Several things jump out from a reading of the transcripts:
1. Independently, the Hills told almost identical stories down to a small detail such as the aliens being confused in removing Barney’s dentures under physical exam in the spacecraft, and then the leader asking Betty telepathically why her teeth were fixed.
2. Both showed extreme agitation under hypnosis at the same part of the story, namely when they feared being captured by the UFO tailing them through the Notch and when the aliens landed and put up a roadblock in a turn off Rt. 3. Barney recalled drawing his gun at this point while severely frightened (he sobbed heavily and ran to a window in Dr. Simon’s office during the session he shared this) before describing the dissociative episode that followed: “I am there-and I am not there.” Betty broke down screaming in her independent hypnotic session when describing what she felt in the car at the time of the roadblock.
3. Neither had any memory of leaving the Notch at Indian Head until seeing a sign “Concord 19 miles” on the highway. They had left a Colebrook diner at 10:05 and, according to Barney, it was a four-hour drive to Portsmouth from Colebrook. They arrived home at 5 a.m. Thus, the interrupted journey with at least two hours unaccounted for.
4. Barney described the movement of the craft in the transcripts as, “I think of a paddle and a ball and a rubber band tied to it. And you hit the ball, and the ball goes out and comes straight back without a circle.” Betty’s independent description of the craft’s movements: “It was turning, it was rotating. And it would go along in a straight line for a short, just a short distance, and then it would tip over on its side, and go up.”
5. There was physical evidence. The zipper on the back of Betty’s dress was partially torn and the dress also had an inexplicable stain. She claimed the aliens removed her dress for a physical exam. The tops of Barney’s dress shoes were scuffed, presumably when the intentionally-stunned man was half-carried into the craft. His recalled explanation was that the tops of his shoes got caught on the edge of the entry ramp as he was dragged into the craft. He said there was a small gap between the ground and the lip of the ramp. The Hills’ car had a series of highly-polished half dollar-sized circles on the trunk. Was this an aid for the spacecraft to track the vehicle?
6. In time, they both reported the aliens had assured them they would forget everything about their experience in Franconia Notch. It’s much less important that the aliens were wrong than that the Hills independently recalled the claim.
In fairness, the Hills’ description of the UAP craft and its turn-on-a-dime flight pattern is consistent with the movement of UAPs in the recently declassified videos and in other 1965 reports.
Fuller summarizes: “To concoct a science fiction story of this magnitude would require an inconceivable skill and collaborative capacity.”
UNH Professor Emeritus Bill Ross curates the UNH Special Collection Library and claims that seventeen percent of website traffic about the collection is in search of information about the Hills and their alleged abduction.
New Hampshire has a roadside historical marker across the road from Indian Head on Rt. 3. Titled The Barney and Betty Hill Incident, it reads in part: “They filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report…This was the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States.”
Part 2, Coming Monday June 15
You can reach John Angelo at timelywriter@yahoo.com