Betty and Barney Hill

Since then this basic story has been repeated so often by others. The circumstances are the same; nighttime abduction by little grey men, bizarre and unpleasant medical tests, release, amnesia of the events followed by nightmares and eventual total recall under hypnosis. Retelling alien abduction reports and circulating rumours of government coverups of saucer crashes have been the meat and drink of UFOlogy since the 1980s (actually attempting to observe and analyse UFOs in the sky is a very minor part of UFOlogical studies it seems). As it is the prototype alien abduction narrative, Barney and Betty’s adventure has been hugely influential (it was was dramatised for TV in 1975 as The UFO Incident), inspiring thousands of flights of fancy in the years that followed. What makes this account more than just another tall tale that many people have copied is the claim that Betty Hill had astronomical knowledge unavailable in 1964. If true, this is truly astonishing, possibly suggesting that the Hill’s account really happened.

• Under hypnosis Betty was able to redraw the map the alien leader had shown her. Betty was vague about what the map actually showed; sometimes she referred to as showing stars and planets. Her sketch was reproduced in books and magazines. In the late 1960s, a teacher called Marjorie Fish (1932-2013) tried to compare the map with real nearby stars and see if any matched. This would not be an easy task as there were about a thousand stars within 50 light years of the Sun. To make things easier, Fish made a series of sensible assumptions based on how similar to us the aliens seemed, suggesting their home planet was very similar to Earth. Based on data that was accurate at that time, she eliminated..
  
  • All non-main sequence stars (habitable planets are unlikely to survive their star’s transition to red giant)
  • All variable stars (it is difficult to see how life could arise on their planets because the huge temperature variations)
  • Stars of class F4 or higher (these would have much shorter lifetimes than our Sun, so less time for life to arise)
  • Multiple star systems where the stars were too close together (stable planetary orbits seem impossible)
  • M class red dwarfs (potential planets would be tidally locked, Fish and others assume this would prevent complex life arising, but this is not universally agreed)