Pod Insights National Park After Dark The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: White Mountain National Forest About this episode In the fall of 1961, a couple driving through New Hampshire’s White Mountains encountered something no one could explain. What followed would become the first widely reported alien abduction case in American history — and the blueprint for every abduction story that came after. For a full list of our sources, visit npadpodcast.com/episodesListen to Watch Her Cook on Apple and Spotify! Follow us on InstagramFor the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials at:Instagram: @nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @nationalparkafterdarkSupport the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page! Thank you to the week’s partners! Pagagen: For an extra 25% off your order and a special gift, head to Pacagen.com/NPAD. Trova Trip: Use promo code NPAD at checkout to save $50 on your next adventure.
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Transcript 12,501 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:59 Cassandra Yahnian? For centuries, the question of whether we're alone in the universe has hovered at the fringes of science, religion, and imagination. But lately, it's been moving closer to the center. An astrophysicist named A.V. Loeb has made headlines in recent years by suggesting that we may already have evidence of advanced intelligent life beyond Earth. Not in just distant galaxies, but right here in our own solar system. In 2017, an object called the Oumuamua passed through space in a way no natural body should, accelerating against gravity, behaving more like a spacecraft than a rock. A.V. Loeb believes it might just have
1:39 Cassandra Yahnian? been that, a probe sent by an alien civilization. And if that's true, he argues, we shouldn't be dismissive. We should be looking closer. More recently, in June 2023, Loeb led a scientific expedition to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where he and his team recovered tiny metallic spheres they believe may have come from an advanced interstellar craft. It's a provocative idea that we are not alone and that they may have already been trying to reach us. It's an idea that casts a long shadow back over stories we've been telling for decades. Stories that have been laughed off, picked apart, and in some cases, quietly buried.
2:21 Danielle LaRock? One of the most well-known of these accounts began on September 19th, 1961, along a dark, remote road in New Hampshire's White Mountains. That night, a couple on a late night drive had an encounter that would come to be known as the first credible and widely reported alien abduction in American history.
2:43 Danielle LaRock? Welcome to National Park After Dark.
3:06 Danielle LaRock? I could cry right now. I'm so excited.
3:11 Danielle LaRock? I'm so thrilled that you are doing this story.
3:14 Cassandra Yahnian? It's been on our minds for a while. This is Danielle and she loves aliens.
3:20 Danielle LaRock? No, this is Danielle. Oh, right.
3:22 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, you are Danielle.
3:24 Danielle LaRock? I am her.
3:25 Cassandra Yahnian? You are Danielle and you love aliens and I'm Cassie and I will be telling Danielle about aliens.
3:31 Danielle LaRock? This story has been, like you said, a long time coming. It's been on our mind. It's been, this is like one of the stories that is from my childhood that I love so, so much. And I never get tired of hearing. And I know you'll be telling it in so much more detail than I'm probably familiar with, so I'm stoked.
3:52 Cassandra Yahnian? Which is great. And part of why I love this story too, is I love a reason to go to the White Mountains. Because if you're new here, you may not, you may not know, but Danielle and I are from New Hampshire and the White Mountains are, have been our backyard growing up. And we're very familiar with this area that the story takes place. It's when you have lore from home, it just kind of hits a little bit differently. So I'm excited to be, I was really excited to learn about it and I'm really excited to bring the White Mountains of New Hampshire into our podcast yet again. I feel like every few months, we find a reason to bring it and we're back.
4:27 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, this is um the sign of which you may or may not talk about. It's like kind of like a side thing. The little sign on the side of the road about this incident I stop at every single time I'm in Lincoln or near Lincoln.
4:42 Cassandra Yahnian? You know what's so funny is I've never been there. So many times I had to have. We're actually gonna be there um pretty soon after this recording. We're staying um in the town next to Lincoln, so. We can stop there. I'll get a picture.
4:58 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, we'll get a picture. I get a picture. I have so many through the years and I can see myself like changing.
5:06 Danielle LaRock? Always have to stop there, but um okay, I brought my little um I have my little alien ready to go. He's ready. I have another one. My mom got me a set of these for my birthday. This one is peace and the other one is um a female alien because she has boobs. And she's going like this, so it's peace and quiet.
5:28 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, that's really cute.
5:29 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, so anyway.
5:30 Cassandra Yahnian? I love I love your enthusiasm for this.
5:33 Danielle LaRock? God, I'm so excited. Okay.
5:36 Cassandra Yahnian? Um, well, uh, if you have not caught on yet, we are going to be talking about the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. And you probably have heard of it before because it is, like I mentioned in the intro, it is a widely covered alien abduction story, probably the most well-known, and it happened right in our neck of the woods, so it's time to dive right in.
5:59 Danielle LaRock? And they're from Portsmouth, which is like my current backyard. Oh, my God.
6:03 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, I'm just. All the connections connecting the dots. You could re-drive this route if you wanted.
6:09 Danielle LaRock? I might.
6:10 Cassandra Yahnian? Nostalgic. You actually probably will coming to meet me up in the White Mountains for sure. You will for sure, actually.
6:17 Danielle LaRock? Yep, wow.
6:19 Cassandra Yahnian? Well, let's dive into it. The year this all happened was 1961. America had just elected its youngest president, John F. Kennedy, and the country was buzzing with promises of progress. The space race was heating up, the Cold War was chilling, and underneath it all was a growing unease about civil rights, about nuclear war, and about what might be waiting beyond the atmosphere. Science fiction was booming, and stories of strange lights in the sky were starting to trickle into the mainstream. The modern era of UFO sightings in the United States began just 14 years earlier in 1947, when an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine silvery objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington State.
7:02 Cassandra Yahnian? He described them moving like a saucer if you skip it across the water, and the press ran with it. Within days, the term "flying saucer" had entered the American vocabulary. That summer of 1947 marked the beginning of a national obsession. In the months that followed, UFO sightings surged. The military scrambled to respond, launching investigations, denying knowledge, and at times, fueling more questions than they answered. By the 1950s, UFOs were a fixture in popular culture like movies and radio, but nobody had ever reported actually interacting with one, let alone being abducted by one. And they were still largely treated as science fiction, not something that respectable, working-class couples talked about out loud.
7:46 Cassandra Yahnian? It's kind of like this taboo, like, kind of fun to talk about, but not in serious reality. And Betty and Barney Hill were exactly that, a respectable, working-class couple. They were not the kind of people who sought out attention. They lived quiet, hard-working lives in the small coastal city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Betty's family had lived there for generations. She was a white, college-educated, and worked as a- She was white, college-educated, and worked as a state social worker handling child welfare cases with a sharp mind and a stubborn sense of justice. People who knew her described her as "practical, intelligent, and deeply compassionate, but also headstrong, someone who would follow a question all the way to its end, even if it seemed unlikely that there would ever be an answer."
8:29 Cassandra Yahnian? Barney was originally from Newport News, Virginia. He grew up in a time and place where being a black man meant constantly having to navigate around other people's expectations and prejudices. He served in the US Army during World War II, and after completing his military service, he moved north to New Hampshire in search of a better life. He got a job as a postal clerk and had two children from a previous marriage. He was thoughtful, sensitive, and meticulous, traits that made him well-suited to his job and to the careful, sometimes fragile, work of living as part of an interracial couple in the 1960s America. Betty and Barney Hill met in 1956 through mutual involvement in community activities. They both had a strong sense of civic duty.
9:11 Cassandra Yahnian? They were active in their local Unitarian church, members of the NAACP, and deeply committed to the budding civil rights movement. These shared values and deep intellectual bonds were the foundation of their relationship. They got married in May of 1960. Physically, the two of them made a striking pair. Betty was petite with short brown hair and a serious expression that often gave way to warm laughter. Barney was tall and broad-shouldered with a deep voice and a quiet charisma. They weren't a flashy or outspoken couple, but their marriage itself was enough to draw stares. In 1961, interracial marriage was still illegal in nearly half the country. New Hampshire wasn't one of those states, but that didn't mean that the Hills weren't immune from judgment.
9:54 Cassandra Yahnian? Every time they checked into a motel or walked into a diner, they were taking a risk. As a black man and a white woman together in 1961, they had to move through the world carefully, and they were used to being watched, to being questioned, to having to prove that they belonged and to prove the legitimacy of their relationship. By the fall of 1961, Betty and Barney Hill had been married for over a year, but they'd never taken a proper honeymoon. Life had gotten in the way, and Betty had been working long and emotionally draining hours as a child welfare caseworker, and Barney was putting in these grueling night shifts at the post office where he had to commute an hour back each day. And when they weren't working, they were volunteering, so they never really had the
10:39 Cassandra Yahnian? chance to take a honeymoon, and they decided that they should. So when Barney proposed a last-minute road trip that September, just the two of them, it felt like this chance to finally breathe and take a step back from their really busy lives. Their plan was to drive up to Montreal and then over to Niagara Falls before heading back to Portsmouth. This would be a spontaneous makeshift honeymoon, nothing fancy, just kind of go by the seat of your pants kind of thing to... Enjoy some time together. Barney requested a few days off of work and then the couple packed a few things and hit the road. But the trip wasn't the relaxing escape that they had originally hoped for. Barney had been grappling with a creeping sense of dread even before they left Portsmouth
11:22 Cassandra Yahnian? and couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. He had packed his pistol just in case because he was so worried that something was going to happen. During the trip, he quietly tried to calm himself down by repeating in his mind, "Not everyone is hostile, not everyone is hostile." But the ominous feeling really stayed with him. Betty, for her part, found that the trip was fun, but she was a little frustrated while she was up in Canada because there was a language barrier. So she wasn't having as much fun in Canada as she thought. And now Barney's kind of feeling like something bad's gonna happen, but he doesn't know what, and he's always watching his back. So this honeymoon just isn't really turning out to what they hoped it would be. Finally, they turn around and they're heading back to New Hampshire on their final night of
12:05 Cassandra Yahnian? the trip. It was September 19th, 1961, and they grabbed a late night bite at a roadside diner in Vermont and then set off for home. It was just after 10:00 PM and they figured that they could make it back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire by around 2:00 in the morning. They were tired, but they were in good spirits. And especially because this trip just didn't go how they expected and wasn't as fun. So they're like, yay, we're getting home. Like, let's just power through the night and we'll get there. So totally unaware of what's about to happen next, they start driving through the dark backroads of New Hampshire's White Mountains National Forest. And when I say these dark roads of New Hampshire backroads, I'm specifically referring to a
12:47 Cassandra Yahnian? remote stretch of the US Route 3 in the heart of New Hampshire's White Mountains. And this area is a part of the national forest that spans over 750,000 acres. It was originally established in 1918, following decades of overlogging and devastating wildfires that left this land pretty vulnerable. So they added protections to it as part of a broader conservation effort sparked by the Weeks Act of 1911. And that act led the federal government to purchase and protect forest lands. And that happened in New Hampshire, which is really cool because now, I mean, The White Mountains are crazy because they're a national forest, but they have over, I think it's one of the most visited national forests that has over three million visitors every year.
13:31 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. Most of which are probably in the fall as we can.
13:35 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, but it's gearing up now, you know, even now in the summer because the little lakes region, when you get up there and I mean, I guess the lakes region isn't the White Mountain National Forest yet.
13:45 Danielle LaRock? It's on the edge.
13:46 Cassandra Yahnian? It's on the way.
13:47 Danielle LaRock? It's on the way.
13:48 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
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14:23 Cassandra Yahnian? Well, part of why there's so many visitors to this area of New England and the White Mountain National Forest is because it's home to some of the highest mountains in the Northeast. Of course, Mount Washington's up there and then you have the Presidential Range and there's just, there's so many hiking opportunities. There's like 12,000 or 1,200 trails. The AT runs through there. There's just so many reasons to be up there. However, back in the 1960s, it was way less built up.
14:52 Danielle LaRock? Mm hmm.
14:52 Cassandra Yahnian? And I say way less built up, but it's still not when you're driving those roads. They're still pretty dark today, but just imagining them in the 1960s, there's even less people there. There's less infrastructure there. So they're driving these windy roads through Franconia Notch, going towards Lincoln, New Hampshire, and there's really not much there. There's the Indian Head Resort, which is still there today.
15:15 Danielle LaRock? Oh, classic.
15:16 Cassandra Yahnian? Classic.
15:17 Danielle LaRock? Yep.
15:17 Cassandra Yahnian? Classic place. I'm still there today, but that was kind of like the biggest thing in the area.
15:23 Danielle LaRock? I actually kind of still hate driving there at night just because it is so dark and there isn't that many people around. And I'm just always so fearful of hitting a moose or a deer because they're everywhere.
15:40 Cassandra Yahnian? And I've never seen a moose up there, but I do see the signs everywhere.
15:46 Danielle LaRock? Allegedly, Cassie. I too have never seen one. But there's a sign every thousand feet, moose crossing, moose crossing.
15:54 Cassandra Yahnian? You know, I have, um, this is kind of off tracking for a minute, but I have a memory from when I was a child of Lincoln, New Hampshire specifically because my, one of my dad's best friends, actually he grew, or he didn't grow up in that area, but he owned a tattoo shop there, lived in Lincoln, New Hampshire. And when I was a kid, we would go up to visit. And there was one night, I don't know how old I was, I was probably like nine or 10. This is like a night I regret to this day.
16:25 Danielle LaRock? Okay.
16:26 Cassandra Yahnian? And I got the invitation to go with my dad's friend, my dad and my brother, to go out into this area where they knew that there were moose. And it was sunset timeframe. They're like, we know there's moose here all the time. Come with us. And I was like, no, he had a daughter that was older and she was a teenager and she was just like, cool. Um, so I wanted to hang out with her and we did henna tattoos and ate like chocolate covered strawberries and had like a girls' night.
16:54 Danielle LaRock? Mm hmm.
16:55 Cassandra Yahnian? And they came back a few hours later and they had this story of driving their car to wherever this location is. I still don't know where it is.
17:05 Danielle LaRock? Mm hmm.
17:05 Cassandra Yahnian? And sitting in the car and they had like three moose right around them. It was like a mom and her babies. And one of them stuck its face like right next to the window where my brother was and just stared at him through the window.
17:18 Danielle LaRock? I knew where she went.
17:19 Cassandra Yahnian? And I wish I went so bad because I still to this day have never seen a moose in New England that was alive.
17:25 Danielle LaRock? Have I?
17:27 Danielle LaRock? Have I said I haven't also?
17:30 Cassandra Yahnian? Uh, I don't know. I feel like you saw one once.
17:33 Danielle LaRock? I did. And that's why I just want to make it clear, cause.
17:36 Cassandra Yahnian? I feel like you have seen one once.
17:38 Danielle LaRock? I have. It was on my way back to my hometown from Keene at school when I was driving that road from Keene back to like southern.
17:46 Cassandra Yahnian? That's not the White Mountains though. That's southern Hampshire.
17:49 Danielle LaRock? But it's still New England and I did see one. So I just want to make that clear that I guess.
17:54 Cassandra Yahnian? It's bad for the brand.
17:55 Danielle LaRock? It is bad for the brand. Never mind. I don't, I don't recall that. Um, but yeah, regrets. You could have seen a moose up close.
18:03 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, like very close. Yeah. I think about that story kind of a lot now and we're going to be in this area soon. So maybe, maybe we can do like.
18:12 Danielle LaRock? May, I have high hopes for us.
18:13 Cassandra Yahnian? A sunset thing or sunrise thing.
18:15 Danielle LaRock? Sunset.
18:16 Cassandra Yahnian? I have high hopes too.
18:17 Danielle LaRock? I don't want to do sunrise.
18:18 Cassandra Yahnian? I'm tired.
18:20 Cassandra Yahnian? Don't make me get up early.
18:21 Cassandra Yahnian? Don't do it.
18:23 Cassandra Yahnian? Okay.
18:24 Cassandra Yahnian? Well.
18:24 Cassandra Yahnian? Betty and Barney Hill, they're.
18:25 Cassandra Yahnian? Betty and Barney Hill, going back to them, the section of the forest where Betty and Barney Hill encountered something strange was in Lincoln, New Hampshire, where we're talking about. And this night in particular, the air was crisp and the September sky was clear and moonless. So it was especially dark. Betty and Barney Hill were driving south in a two-tone 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air. Oh, God.
18:48 Cassandra Yahnian? I know exactly what that is.
18:50 Cassandra Yahnian? I know what that is, too. That just brought me a memory that I forgot that I had of seeing this. About 45 minutes into the drive, as they neared to the Indian Head Resort, Betty looked out the passenger side window and spotted a strange light in the sky. At first, it looked like a bright star or maybe a satellite, but something about it seemed off. It was moving, darting slightly and then stopping, changing direction in an unusual way as well. Betty pointed it out to Barney, who was driving, and they both watched as the object seemed to start following them, hovering and then shifting again. They pulled over to get a better look through binoculars that Barney had brought for sightseeing on their trip. Looking at the light more closely, Betty felt certain that it wasn't a plane, at least not any kind that she had ever seen.
19:33 Cassandra Yahnian? It seemed to be rotating with flashing multicolored lights bouncing from one side of the sky to the other in erratic, impossible patterns. Barney, on the other hand, wasn't convinced it was anything unusual, at least not yet. He chalked it up to a plane, maybe a satellite, but as they continued driving south through Franconia Notch, the object seemed to be descending and getting closer. Just past the Indian Head Resort, near a patch of open land and trees, the light in the sky dipped down over the highway. Barney brought the car to a stop. He got out, leaving the engine running, and walked into a clearing with the binoculars in hand, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. What hovered in the air above him was a huge disk, maybe 60 feet across, with rows of
20:16 Cassandra Yahnian? red lights and a long curved surface, like a flying saucer. It was impossibly silent, hovering about 100 feet off the ground, and through binoculars, Barney could see windows along the front of the craft. And through those windows, he couldn't believe his eyes, but he saw figures in a humanoid shape.
20:35 Cassandra Yahnian? He noted that there were about 11 of them and that they were all looking back at him, watching him. One of those figures to him appeared to be a leader and stepped forward and looked right at him. At that moment Barney could hear a voice in his head saying, "Stay where you are and keep looking." In a rush of fear and panic, he tore the binoculars from his face and ran back to his car yelling to Betty, "They're going to capture us." He sped away down the road headlights cutting through the dark, but the flying saucer stayed with the car now hovering directly overhead. And then, a new sensation came to them. There was a strange rhythmic buzzing sound coming from the trunk of the car and the whole car
21:17 Cassandra Yahnian? began to vibrate. Both Betty and Barney felt a tingling sweep through their bodies and then there was complete silence. And the next thing they knew, they were driving again, somehow already south of Ashland, 35 miles away from where they remembered being. Neither of them could remember what happened during those 35 miles, or how much time had passed, but something felt very wrong. Betty kept looking out the window for the object while Barney just drove quietly stunned. When they made it home to Portsmouth, it wasn't 2:00 AM like they had planned. It was just after dawn, which meant what should have been a four-hour drive had actually taken seven and they had no memory to account for the missing hours. But even stranger than the missing time were the small inexplicable
22:02 Cassandra Yahnian? signs that something had happened. The leather strap on Barney's binoculars were broken, his dress shoes were scuffed and scraped as though he had been dragged, and Betty's dress was torn at the hem and the zipper was split down the back. On the trunk of the car, they noticed shiny circular marks that spread outward in evenly spaced rings from a central spot, markings that they were sure had not been there prior. Following a suggestion from her sister's neighbor, a physicist, Betty held a compass over the spot to check for magnetic anomalies. The neighbor had explained that if the needle began to spin, it would signal the presence of a magnetic field. Sure enough, as she hovered the compass over the mysterious circles, the needles began to whirl uncontrollably.
22:46 Cassandra Yahnian? This solidified for them that something in fact had happened to them that night, but they still didn't know what. The only thing that they were certain of,
22:53 Cassandra Yahnian? Was that before their lapse in time, they had seen something otherworldly. And that part of this, that story, I know that this is like the origin story and we'll get into it, but it reminds me so much of the other UFO stories that you've told. The one in Maine and then Travis Walden. Walden, he just like the time lapse and like just the descriptions of everything. I'm like this, I've heard this before. But this is the first time.
23:19 Danielle LaRock? There are similarities in a lot of cases, although different, you know, between Travis's and the Alagash Four and now Betty and Barney Hill and others that are, there's different circumstances and how they handle it and what happens afterwards varies. But there are certain elements that remain the same and that just adds to, in my mind, there's something here, like the credibility of what's going on, like where there's smoke, there's fire type of thing.
23:52 Cassandra Yahnian? Mm hmm.
23:53 Danielle LaRock? And I just, I'm sorry if I'm being like super quiet. I'm just really.
23:57 Cassandra Yahnian? Invested.
23:58 Danielle LaRock? I love this story so much and it never gets old.
24:03 Cassandra Yahnian? Well, I, I think what's so interesting about this story is that there are similarities, like you mentioned with the other stories, but I think what makes this one so interesting and we'll jump into that more towards the end, is that this is the very first one.
24:17 Danielle LaRock? Hmm.
24:18 Cassandra Yahnian? So we're kind of telling them out of order because Betty and Barney are the first to ever do it, the first to have ever done it, but um, yeah. Then later we see all the similarities with those other stories. So the day after they got home on September 20th, Betty decided to call the local air force base and report a UFO sighting. She didn't mention the missing time or those circles on her car or the figures that they had seen in the windows. She just mentioned the lights in the sky, the strange way the objects had moved and reported.
24:47 Cassandra Yahnian? That sighting. An intelligence officer took down her report and filed it with the Project Blue Book, which was the US government's official investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena. It ran from 1947 to 1969, and it was tasked with determining whether UFOs posed a threat to national security and whether they might be evidence of advanced technology. Most reported cases were dismissed or misidentified aircrafts or or natural phenomena, but a small percentage remained unexplained, including Betty and Barney Hills. We know that because Betty's report would eventually be declassified, but at the time, the Hills heard nothing more from the Air Force. After filing the report, they didn't talk much about what had happened,
25:32 Cassandra Yahnian? not even to each other. They were tired, shaken, maybe just trying to move on from the incident. But in the days and weeks that followed, Betty couldn't stop replaying it in her mind. The missing time, the strange buzzing sound, the glowing object in the sky, her torn dress, the spinning compass. It all just didn't make any sense. She had a practical mind and wasn't one to jump to conclusions, but there was just no way to explain what she and Barney had seen or how it had made them feel.
26:02 Danielle LaRock? I, if that was me, I would never shut up about it.
26:06 Cassandra Yahnian? Like, it finally happened.
26:07 Danielle LaRock? I, I would want to talk about it. It's the same thing, again, kind of going back to the Alagash Four, of how they kind of, they acknowledged it in the immediate aftermath. But then after a brief discussion, they kind of just let it go and that was it, until decades later, like 12 years later.
26:24 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
26:25 Danielle LaRock? But still, like, I would, I'm such a talker. I, I need to work through this out loud with you. You know what I mean? Like, I can't.
26:32 Cassandra Yahnian? Especially the person who experienced it with you.
26:35 Danielle LaRock? Right. Well, that's what I'm saying. Like, I wouldn't, I'm not saying I would blab about it to just anybody, but the person that was there and we have a shared experience, like I, that has so many question marks, I want to. Talk about this with you.
26:48 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, I agree, but I feel like for them, I can also kind of get it. I agree because I feel like I would be the same way. I'd be like, oh, my God, what just happened? What was that? But I think at the same time, they're both so confused. They're like, did that happen? Am I crazy? Did they, did they experience this? Like, maybe there's even like a question of like, am I alone? Did they actually?
27:09 Danielle LaRock? Yeah.
27:10 Cassandra Yahnian? You know, like, I don't know. But I agree. I think it's weird to not mention it to each other. Yeah, it's just like, okay, let's forget about that and continue on with our lives.
27:19 Danielle LaRock? I can understand maybe a pause and like for like the shock maybe of
27:23 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
27:24 Danielle LaRock? whatever to kind of settle in and work its way through you and then, but I don't know. I would just, it couldn't be me is all I'm trying to say.
27:32 Cassandra Yahnian? We finally got abducted. It happened.
27:35 Danielle LaRock? I would just.
27:36 Cassandra Yahnian? What do you remember? What'd they say?
27:37 Danielle LaRock? Tell me everything about your experience and yeah, yeah.
27:41 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
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29:08 Cassandra Yahnian? Well Barney, who tended to keep his emotions close to his chest, tried to push through his feelings of the incident, but it wasn't working. He started feeling anxious and on edge. He could barely sleep. And when he did, he woke up in a cold sweat. He couldn't stop his mind from going back to that moment in the clearing, to the eyes watching him from behind the windows of the hovering craft, to the other worldly voices inside his own head that were happening. Then Betty began to have vivid dreams, and they weren't just unsettling, they were specific. She dreamed of being taken aboard a spacecraft and being separated from Barney. She dreamed of medical examinations and strange tools, and of a humanoid figure who seemed kind, almost curious, and who showed her a three-dimensional star map,
29:52 Cassandra Yahnian? which Betty couldn't make sense of, but remembered it with perfect clarity. The dreams came every night for five nights, and then stopped altogether. But they stayed with her. They felt so important that she wrote them down in detail. At this point, she didn't believe that they were real, but she just wanted to record them so she could try and make sense of them and figure out if there was some type of pattern, or if there was something, some deeper meaning that she was missing. But she wasn't really considering the fact that this could have happened to her. Barney, meanwhile, refused to read her writings. He didn't want to know what was going on in Betty's mind, because he was already struggling with his own. His health was starting to decline, his ulcers flared up, and he was plagued by migraines and persistent insomnia. He couldn't explain why, but he had the overwhelming sense
30:37 Cassandra Yahnian? that something had been done to him, and something that he didn't want to remember. As the weeks passed, their feelings didn't go away, and the couple started to feel more and more alone with the experience. They confided in a few friends at church, and through one of those friends, they were connected with Walter Webb, an astronomer and UFO investigator from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. On October 21st, 1961, a month after the incident, Walter Webb interviewed Betty and Barney at length. By the end of their six-hour session, he believed that they weren't lying about what they had seen. Or believed they had seen, but concluded that they were struggling to recall a traumatic experience buried deep in their memory.
31:19 Cassandra Yahnian? Webb's report offered them some validation, but no real resolution. Betty continued to pursue answers on her own, diving into existing literature on UFOs. Barney, on the other hand, grew more withdrawn, increasingly anxious, physically unwell, and reluctant to engage. The couple tried to move forward and tried to manage the experience privately, but the questions never stopped gnawing at them. Months passed and then years. Finally, in 1964, still tormented by their memories nearly three years after that night on Route 3, they decided to seek professional help. Barney's health had continued to deteriorate, and their family physician was increasingly concerned.
32:00 Cassandra Yahnian? He recognized that Barney's physical symptoms might actually be rooted in trauma and stress, so he referred the couple to Dr. Benjamin Simon. Unlike Walter Webb, Dr. Simon wasn't a UFO believer. He was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and respected voice in his field, and a military veteran who made a name for himself treating soldiers with what we now recognize as PTSD. During World War II, he served as the chief of neuropsychiatry at a military hospital in New York, where he pioneered the use of hypnosis to help veterans recover repressed memories and process combat trauma. By the early 1960s, he had a private practice in Boston and a reputation for treating serious psychological distress with empathy, rigor, and scientific discipline.
32:45 Cassandra Yahnian? But again, had no belief or experience with UFO sightings was not in his wheelhouse. So to be clear, when the couple were referred to Dr. Simon, it wasn't because anyone thought that they had actually been abducted by aliens, it was because it was clear that they were suffering. And Dr. Simon in no way set out to validate any part of the experience of UFOs. His goal was purely therapeutic to help access whatever repressed memories they had buried and hopefully help them begin to heal. What emerged from those sessions would become one of the most famous and arguably one of the most credible alien abduction accounts in modern history. We should know, of course, and we've spoken about this before on the podcast,
33:30 Cassandra Yahnian? but hypnosis therapy to recover repressed memories is a highly controversial practice. And with good reason, studies have shown that it can increase a person's confidence in distorted or even entirely fabricated memories, especially when suggestive questioning is involved. We, of course, have talked about this with Travis Walton, Alagash Four, which are the two other alien ones that we mentioned before. But there's, there's a lot of issues with hypn-
33:59 Danielle LaRock? We're aware.
34:00 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah. We're aware, but we're still going to talk about it anyway.
34:03 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, because it happened and it's part of the story.
34:05 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah. And I think that what came out of it, especially from a person who does not believe in UFOs or believe that they were abducted by UFOs to be leading this hypnosis, I think is important to note.
34:18 Danielle LaRock? Yeah.
34:19 Cassandra Yahnian? In all of these cases, it's difficult to determine what may have actually happened from what was constructed intentionally or not in the mind of someone trying to make sense of trauma. However, just acknowledging the limitations of hypnosis doesn't mean that we should totally dismiss it, especially when memories come with such emotional clarity and consistency. Dr. Benjamin Simon began working with Betty and Barney in January of 1964. Over the course of six months, he conducted a series of weekly sessions, all of which he recorded on tape. He used a technique known as time regression hypnosis. The goal was to recover blocked and repressed memories. In this case, From the couple hour period that they had no conscious recollection from that night that they were driving home.
35:04 Cassandra Yahnian? Crucially, Dr. Simon would hypnotize Betty and Barney separately, so their accounts wouldn't influence each other. After putting them into a deep, relaxed state, he would guide them back to the night of the incident, to that missing window of time that had been haunting them all of these years. He then asked them open-ended questions and let their memories unfold gradually. The technique allowed them to relive the experiences vividly. Barney's session came first. They were marked by extreme emotional distress. He would sweat, tremble, and even cry while describing what he saw and felt that night. His voice sometimes broke and he appeared terrified. But as the sessions continued, his memory began to take shape with chilling clarity.
35:45 Cassandra Yahnian? According to Barney's recovered memories, after the car vibrated and the buzzing sounds filled the air, he lost control of the vehicle. The next thing he remembered was being surrounded by a group of small beings, maybe five feet tall, humanoid but not quite human. They had large bald heads, grayish skin, and slanted, almost almond-shaped eyes that wrapped around their temples. This is now the classic image most of us have in our minds when we picture extraterrestrials, but at the time, nobody had ever described an extraterrestrial or alien before. So this was the first time anyone had said that.
36:21 Danielle LaRock? And now it's just so crazy that like that's.
36:25 Cassandra Yahnian? You literally have that sitting with you right now.
36:27 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, that's what I think.
36:28 Cassandra Yahnian? A moment in history.
36:30 Danielle LaRock? A gray alien, to be specific.
36:33 Cassandra Yahnian? Gray, too. Barney's memory, even under hypnosis, was fragmented and painful. He described being told to lie on a metal examination table, where the beings then removed his clothes and examined him, his skin, his ears, his mouth, his genitals. He said something was placed over his groin, and he believed they took a sperm sample, though he wasn't touched by any of the beings directly. At one point, he recalled a tube-like instrument being inserted into his rectum. He couldn't move, all while he couldn't look away from their enormous black eyes. Betty's hypnosis session with Dr. Simon followed Barney's. Her tone was often calmer, more curious, but her descriptions were equally, if not more, detailed. And what stunned Dr. Simon was the degree to which the hills' separate accounts aligned.
37:18 Cassandra Yahnian? Eventually, he conducted a few joint sessions, allowing the couple to discuss together what they had remembered, but for the most part, he kept their sessions separate. Without knowing what the other had said, each described being taken aboard a craft, examined, and then returned. Each mentioned the same number of beings, the same layout of the ship, the same buzzing sound, along with the same ramp and the same feeling of paralysis. Betty specifically described being led into a bright, sterile room aboard the craft. In that room, she was instructed to lie down on a narrow metal examination table, again, much like what Barney had described. To conduct her physical exam, the beings partially removed her dress, which might explain how it was torn when she came back to consciousness.
38:03 Cassandra Yahnian? A long needle was then inserted into her belly button, which the beings explained to her was a pregnancy test. She remembered one of them trying to brush her hair, taking skin and nail samples, and communicating with her telepathically. She felt the presence of a lead figure, someone who seemed curious and kind, and who tried to explain what was happening to her. The most striking part of her memory came at the end. She asked the beings where they were from, and in response, the leader showed her a three-dimensional star map made up of dots and lines. Some stars were connected, indicating trade or travel routes. Others were unconnected, places that they had observed but hadn't visited. Betty asked where Earth was on the map, but the being told her it wouldn't help if,
38:45 Cassandra Yahnian? quote, "If you don't know where you are, there isn't any point of my telling where I am from." And I just thought that that part was so interesting that he, in her memory, this being is indicating trade routes. I'm like, what do you mean trade routes between?
39:00 Danielle LaRock? I get it.
39:01 Cassandra Yahnian? Planets, I get it. I'm just floored.
39:04 Danielle LaRock? Floored. It reminds me so much of, and I wonder if this part of the movie was inspired by this portion of the story, but have you seen K-Pax?
39:16 Cassandra Yahnian? I haven't.
39:17 Danielle LaRock? Oh, my god. Okay, recommendation to everyone. It's an older movie and it's actually one. So when my dad passed away, I went through a bunch of his stuff and took a lot of, not a lot of things, but things primarily with either his handwriting or that had sentimental value. And a lot of the things with his handwriting on them were VHS tapes that had like a handmade label on the spine and he would write, cause he would-
39:44 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, I remember those well.
39:45 Danielle LaRock? He would tape and they were all, oh my God, like in his, I have like a little curio cabinet of all his stuff. And there's like, it says like Oklahoma Bigfoot ninety-four or like UFO whatever. Cause I mean, my dad, it was in his obituary and his eulogy of how much he loved aliens and Bigfoot and like the apple doesn't fall far, right? So, but anyway, I took a couple of other things, cause we loved movies so much that I just wanted to take some and add them to the collection. And one of them was K-Pax and I recently re-watched it within the last six months.
40:24 Danielle LaRock? Not on the VHS, I don't have a VHS player, but you know, I got it from like Prime. And it has, what's his name? The guy in, it's not John Cusack. It's the guy that's in Pay It Forward. Have you seen that?
40:39 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, I have seen Pay It Forward a long time ago.
40:42 Danielle LaRock? Hold on, let's see.
40:43 Cassandra Yahnian? Wait, it's K-Pax? How do you spell that?
40:46 Danielle LaRock? K-P-A-X.
40:48 Cassandra Yahnian? Okay. I wasn't sure if it was packs or like packs, like a pack of gum.
40:52 Danielle LaRock? Oh, gotcha. Yeah. Okay. Kevin Spacey.
40:55 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, okay.
40:56 Danielle LaRock? Okay. He's the main character. Uh, Jeff Bridges is in it too. But anyway, so essentially he plays this entity being called K-Pax and he takes, he essentially takes over a human body. And he's an extraterrestrial that takes over a human body to experience Earth and being a person and whatever. And he's very forthcoming about it. Anyway, I'm not gonna go through the entire movie, but there's a specific scene where he's showing where he's from in a map, like he wrote, showed, writes it down, kind of like you're saying, like a star map. He's like, this is my home. This is where I'm from. And at first Jeff Bridges, who plays like a doctor at a psychiatric hospital that K-Pax is
41:40 Danielle LaRock? in because everything, everyone thinks he's just somebody who has mental illness and not an alien, uh, like he says he is. It gets to the point that Jeff Bridges' character is kind of starting to believe him. And so he brings that star map to an astrophysicist. And they're like, this is legit. Like this person would never know this because we're just finding out that this, this map of star system is real.
42:07 Cassandra Yahnian? Interesting. I bet it is from this because I'll get into it, um, more towards the end of the episode, but there's a few different like Hollywood television stuff that seem to have really copied Betty and Barney Hill's experience.
42:21 Danielle LaRock? I would just be so, I mean, anyone who's seen K-Pax knows the scene exactly. And it just kind of mirrors.
42:28 Cassandra Yahnian? I want to watch that movie. It sounds fun.
42:29 Danielle LaRock? It's really fun. It's like, it's, it's kind of a little emotional, but it's really feel good and it makes you think. And yeah, and I know Kevin Spacey is canceled maybe in some way. I feel like he did something bad.
42:43 Cassandra Yahnian? I feel like he did something bad too, but I just don't follow.
42:46 Danielle LaRock? Let's just detach from that for a second for K-Pax. This was in the.
42:49 Cassandra Yahnian? It was before he did bad things.
42:51 Danielle LaRock? I think this was like ninety four, ninety five that this, oh, two thousand and one.
42:59 Danielle LaRock? Sorry, it felt a lot older.
43:01 Cassandra Yahnian? I mean, two thousand and one is still 24 years ago. So.
43:03 Danielle LaRock? Yeah.
43:12 Danielle LaRock? Okay. Anyway, back to the OGs.
43:14 Cassandra Yahnian? So she's telling this experience. He, she asks where they are. He points to this map and says, if you don't know where you are, then there's no point in telling you where I'm from. Eventually after that, they were returned to their car.
43:26 Cassandra Yahnian? The beings told them that they would forget what had happened. The car started again and the Hills drove off into the early morning darkness. And that was what they told Dr. Simon. In total, Dr. Simon conducted around a dozen hypnosis sessions with each of them over a span of six months, wrapping up in June 1964. By the end, both Betty and Barney felt some emotional relief. Regaining their memory of the lost time through therapy had helped them regain a sense of control over the event, even if what they remembered made their story more bizarre and hard to believe rather than less. At least it was some type of answer for them. Dr. Simon was cautious in how he interpreted what the Hills recalled during their sessions. He didn't claim Betty and Barney were lying. In fact, he said the opposite.
44:11 Cassandra Yahnian? He believed that they were both very sincere. He didn't think that they were hoaxers and they weren't trying to concoct this story to seek attention. And it was clear to him that they truly believed every word that they were saying. However, even with all of this, he still did not believe that they were actually abducted by aliens. And he didn't think that they were remembering an accurate account of whatever had happened to them that night. In the end, Dr. Simon never publicly endorsed the idea that the Hills had been abducted by aliens. His final assessment was that they had experienced something traumatic that night and that the abduction memories were hallucinations that may have formed in a way of processing trauma,
44:52 Cassandra Yahnian? perhaps influenced by the extraterrestrial dreams that Betty had had in the weeks after the event and thought that maybe this was linked to something, something else entirely. It was like, this is just a trauma response. You're thinking alien, something really bad did happen to you, but your mind is not allowing you to remember because it was so bad that you've now concocted this alien abduction memory in its place. Okay. But whatever the explanation of why they were both remembering this and had the abductions, you can't help but remember and think about really that their accounts exactly matched. So to say that they were, they had this traumatic event and they were doing this hallucination of an alien abduction,
45:37 Cassandra Yahnian? the two of them, the same, the same story, everything aligns is kind of like, wait a second. What are the chances that they would both experience the same traumatic event? And that they would both, both of their minds would try to like self preserve, self preservation.
45:55 Cassandra Yahnian? For them to remember the same exact alien abduction versus whatever happened to them. So there was like some questions of like, okay, uh, wh- what do you mean this is like? What do you mean that this isn't real?
46:09 Danielle LaRock? Well, and there's like some physical elements as well, like physical evidence, right? Like with the circles on the car and then the scuffs on, you know, Barney's shoes and the dress tearing and loss of time and I, I don't know. Well, that's not physical evidence, but you know what I mean?
46:25 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, but there's, there's all these other indications of, okay, something happened. But why, if we did experience this trauma, why would we both replace that trauma with the exact same story?
46:36 Danielle LaRock? And did he indicate like what trauma? Like what trauma are they?
46:41 Cassandra Yahnian? It seems like he thought like, it seems like he thought that they experienced uh, some type of trauma, maybe at the hands of someone else because they were experiencing, they, they were talking about, yeah, like repressed experience. Maybe because they were talking about being probed and looked at, like maybe it was something that actually happened to them, but was an actual person, you know, he was just like not buying the alien abduction thing.
47:05 Danielle LaRock? Aspect.
47:06 Cassandra Yahnian? Yes.
47:07 Danielle LaRock? Okay.
47:07 Cassandra Yahnian? For years, Betty and Barney had managed to keep their story private, shared only with a handful of close friends, investigators, and of course, Dr. Simon. Even after the hypnosis sessions concluded in the summer of 1964, they still weren't looking to go public with that story. They had no desire to become national punchlines, especially again, as an interracial couple. They didn't want to draw this unwanted attention to themselves, but the story had a way of slipping out. That fall, Betty and Barney gave a confidential talk to a small UFO group in Quincy, Massachusetts. They had been assured that the meeting wasn't recorded, but someone took notes. And eventually those notes made their way to a journalist.
47:47 Cassandra Yahnian? On October 25th, 1965, a newspaper called The Boston Traveler ran the first in a five-part front page series about the Hill's story under the bold headline, UFO Chiller, Did They Seize Couple? The reporter, John H. Luttrell, had somehow pieced together the Hill's account, including details from the hypnosis sessions and Betty's dreams and published it without their permission. Of course, the story blew up immediately and just like that, the most intimate, bewildering experience of their lives was now national news and they had no say over it. Which I just, from A couple that's being so private to then pick up the newspaper one day and there's a five-page news spread about you.
48:31 Cassandra Yahnian? And all of these details that you have told very few people, it'd be very upsetting.
48:36 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, I can imagine.
48:38 Cassandra Yahnian? And of course, at first, the Hills were devastated. Barney in particular felt deeply violated. They had spent years trying to understand what had happened to them, only to be thrust into the public eye in this sensational way, which was never their intention. This story wasn't treated like an astronomical or physiological mystery. It was framed like this tabloid thriller. Alien abduction, mind control, missing time. And for many readers, it was something that they laughed off or dismissed entirely. It was like this fun, entertaining read for them where they could be like, haha, aliens, yeah, sure, whatever. And for them, it was this like really traumatic emotional experience that they had been grappling for years with. And the backlash was swift and varied.
49:23 Cassandra Yahnian? Some skeptics argued that the Hills were imagining things, or worse, fabricating the whole event for attention. Others leaned on psychological theories. Maybe the experience was a shared delusion, or a dream misremembered, or the product of intense stress. A few fixated on Betty's interest in UFOs and suggested she'd simply read too much science fiction stories. But beneath those surface-level critics were other, uglier undercurrents. The fact that Betty was white and Barney was black made them the target of racial prejudice and cultural discomfort. In 1960s America, even in New England, their union made them visible, vulnerable, and controversial. For many people, the idea that this couple could be the center of such a sensational
50:08 Cassandra Yahnian? story made it a lot easier to dismiss. Some critics even suggested that the alien abduction narrative was a cover for a psychological breakdown over the pressures of their relationship, as if their marriage was this like, was too far-fetched to be a stable one, and this was kind of like this cover-up of, for whatever reason.
50:36 Cassandra Yahnian? As the media frenzy grew, The Hills realized that they couldn't take control of the story unless they decided to tell it themselves. So they did. They agreed to collaborate with a journalist and author named John G. Fuller, who approached their case with a seriousness and respect that they hadn't yet received from the press. With The Hills' full cooperation and access to Dr. Simon's hypnosis tapes, Fuller wrote "The Interrupted Journey," published in 1966. This book became a bestseller, and overnight, Betty and Barney became the unwitting pioneers of an entirely new genre: the alien abduction narrative. The response from the American public was mixed. Some readers were captivated, others were skeptical.
51:19 Cassandra Yahnian? The UFO community embraced The Hills as credible witnesses. Scientists and psychiatrists, however, were divided. Some again accused Betty and Barney of fabrication, despite the fact that they were clearly uncomfortable with the attention. But over time, the noise quieted, and more serious conversation began to take shape. Researchers and skeptics revisited The Hills' case, and many came to the same conclusion Dr. Benjamin Simon had reached himself at the end of their hypnosis therapy sessions. Whether or not you believed in extraterrestrial life, The Hills themselves believed what they described. They weren't faking it, they weren't looking for fame, they were a middle-aged couple who had lived through something they couldn't explain, and who seemed to wish more than anything that they hadn't experienced it at all.
52:03 Cassandra Yahnian? In fact, Barney was so distressed by the unwanted attention that many believed it contributed to his declining health and tragic early death. At the age of 46, just four years after the story went public, a cerebral hemorrhage took Barney's life. During those four years, he never once wavered in his account of that night. Betty lived until 2004 and remained active in the UFO community for the rest of her life. Answering letters, giving lectures, and standing by what she and her husband experienced that night on Route 3. Overall, their story is compelling and it's hard not to want to believe them. This story has served as a major factor in how we perceive aliens today. The recorded hypnosis sessions with Dr. Simon, which remain controversial, lend Betty and Barney's
52:48 Cassandra Yahnian? story credibility. Conducted by a reputable doctor with no stake in the UFO phenomenon, the sessions were detailed, consistent, and profoundly emotional. Betty and Barney didn't just describe what happened, they had to relive it. Barney was so emotional that he wept, he trembled, he begged for the figures to stop looking at him. These weren't the actions of someone who was performing, they were, they were the reactions of someone who had experienced something traumatic. In addition, unlike later abduction cases, including the ones that we've talked about, like Travis Walton's, The Hills account was truly the first of its kind. Their stories included details that had absolutely no precedent in pop culture at the time, including
53:29 Cassandra Yahnian? the concept of medical examination, the probes, the paralysis, the telepathic communication, the missing time, and now, like we mentioned before, the iconic image of the gray alien with oversized, with an oversized head and the black wraparound eyes. These weren't sci-fi portrayals of aliens before The Hills, but in the years that followed, they became part of the mainstream culture, especially after the movie The UFO Incident starring James Earl Jones as Barney came out in 1975. And all of this kind of suggests that The Hills weren't copying anyone. If anything, other people were copying them. You know, all of these things that they're talking about and accounting for, no one has ever talked about this before. It's not like, it's kind of
54:13 Cassandra Yahnian? hard to imagine, I think, now because we have seen so much aliens, so much alien stuff in the movies and magazines, you know, and drawings and stuffed animals, you know, whatever you've seen aliens, or what is depicted of them. When they came out and described this encounter, not a single person had ever come out and explained this type of detail before. So.
54:38 Danielle LaRock? They truly had, they truly had the first encounter of the fourth kind. You know how there's different levels of, you know, first, second, third, fourth encounters, you know, whatever, um, of kinds. And the fourth, I believe, is direct abduction. So they truly had the, the first encounter of the fourth kind.
54:58 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah. And that's just. There were like lights in the sky, but.
55:02 Danielle LaRock? Yeah, there's, let's see, the first, the first kind, I believe, is just, like you said, witnessing something strange.
55:10 Cassandra Yahnian? Mm hmm.
55:11 Danielle LaRock? I think the second is witnessing something strange along with something else, like some sort of, God, I don't know. It's been a long time since I've thought about it. Have you seen Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, the movie?
55:24 Cassandra Yahnian? A long time ago, but my memory of movies is trash.
55:28 Danielle LaRock? Well, yeah, and it, I know.
55:34 Danielle LaRock? Um, maybe let me look it up. Just so we all are on the, this is fun. Okay, so the first kind is a sighting of an unidentified flying object or alien craft, often at a distance. So that was right. The second kind is a UFO sighting accompanied by physical evidence such as scorch marks, strange electromagnetic interference, or physiological effects on a witness.
55:58 Cassandra Yahnian? Okay.
55:58 Danielle LaRock? So like a crop circle, like you see something and then there's a crop circle or something.
56:02 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah.
56:03 Danielle LaRock? The third kind is direct interaction with an alien being or creature, either aboard or outside of the UFO. And the fourth kind is alien abduction where individuals are taken and possibly experimented upon. And then the fifth kind is direct communication with aliens, such as through telepathy or other forms of communication.
56:23 Cassandra Yahnian? So would they be the, the first account of the fifth kind?
56:26 Danielle LaRock? The fourth and fifth.
56:27 Cassandra Yahnian? The fourth and fifth, because she mentioned that they were speaking telepathically to each other.
56:32 Danielle LaRock? And then there are, it, it goes on to say there are additional levels that are less common or are heavily debated. And it goes up through sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and then CE seven, which is.
56:45 Cassandra Yahnian? Like it's really into this.
56:48 Danielle LaRock? This is a human slash alien hybrid being either through biological reproduction or artificial means.
56:54 Cassandra Yahnian? Wait, there's, we've been reproducing with aliens?
56:58 Danielle LaRock? I mean, some people think that that's what we are.
57:01 Cassandra Yahnian? I mean, that's not, that's a wild concept to think about, like, what if we are the aliens? What if we came here from another?
57:08 Danielle LaRock? Some people think that we are, cause you know, there's the whole debate of the missing link and like what happened in that gap of time? Like, we have all this evolutionary evidence up to a certain point, and then there's this chunk that's missing. And then here we are, modern humans. So a lot of people fill in that gap with that we are true human alien hybrids. And that the reason that we are having abductions and all this like testing and monitoring by different aliens throughout time is that they're coming to check upon their experiment.
57:40 Cassandra Yahnian? They're seeing how we're faring.
57:42 Danielle LaRock? Yeah.
57:42 Cassandra Yahnian? And all of these little things, like how I mentioned, they found these spheres in the ocean. These are all our old technology to get here that we're finding.
57:51 Danielle LaRock? I'm just saying, it's, I'm not saying I co-sign that a hundred percent just because.
57:56 Cassandra Yahnian? It's an interesting theory. I mean, it's fun to talk about.
57:59 Danielle LaRock? It's cool to debate and talk about and like, you know, I think that people with open minds can see a world in which that could be true. But I wouldn't be like, yeah, that's exactly what happened, but.
58:10 Cassandra Yahnian? I believe this fully.
58:12 Danielle LaRock? Who am I to say?
58:13 Cassandra Yahnian? It's like, I wasn't there.
58:14 Danielle LaRock? Right.
58:15 Cassandra Yahnian? But, um.
58:16 Danielle LaRock? Maybe, who knows? Yeah. So anyway, I just think it's really interesting that there's all these different, okay, the ninth kind.
58:24 Cassandra Yahnian? There's a ninth kind?
58:25 Danielle LaRock? Well, yeah, remember, cause it goes, so the sixth through the CE seven that I just described are like the debated ones and kind of like out there, even for I think people who are interested in this. The ninth kind says, long-term relationship with an alien where doubts or challenges may arise.
58:42 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, so like.
58:44 Danielle LaRock? That's a true long distance relationship. You think that you have it hard having a long distance relationship?
58:50 Cassandra Yahnian? Try having a relationship. I want to know someone who's.
58:53 Danielle LaRock? Try having a relationship of the ninth kind. And then come talk to me. I like long distance relationships because it's like you do your thing, I do my thing, and then we'll do our thing sometimes together.
59:04 Cassandra Yahnian? That's called casually dating.
59:07 Danielle LaRock? Is it?
59:11 Danielle LaRock? No.
59:13 Cassandra Yahnian? No.
59:14 Danielle LaRock? No.
59:15 Cassandra Yahnian? That's just casually dating but adding in the extra miles so you don't run into each other unwanted.
59:21 Danielle LaRock? Sometimes it works out for people.
59:25 Danielle LaRock? The eighth kind, I said, we weren't going to get into it, but I just have to say.
59:28 Cassandra Yahnian? I want to know.
59:30 Danielle LaRock? Okay, the eighth kind is conflict or disagreement with an alien, potentially a fight.
59:35 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, there's that.
59:37 Danielle LaRock? The seventh kind is long intimate conversations with an alien. Oh, doesn't elaborate.
59:43 Cassandra Yahnian? Um, of any kind.
59:45 Danielle LaRock? I mean, there, I guess I could look into this more, but this is just the Spark Notes version.
59:48 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, it's interesting.
59:49 Danielle LaRock? I feel like this is more of, you know, when have you have my, my algorithm is probably unlike yours in many ways. But I get a lot of clips and reels of people who are allegedly communing with an alien entity and they're giving like, they like go into a trance and they'll start speaking and it's not them speaking. It's like this other entity.
1:00:15 Cassandra Yahnian? I've never gone that on my algorithm.
1:00:17 Danielle LaRock? Okay, well, I do, and that's the seventh kind, I think. And then the sixth kind, the last one that will, um, fill in the gap here is something I can relate to. Intense attraction or strong urge to be with an alien.
1:00:31 Cassandra Yahnian? You want to like romantically?
1:00:33 Danielle LaRock? I don't think this is not romantically, although that would probably be wild. And something I'd be down to try, um, but it doesn't elaborate.
1:00:44 Cassandra Yahnian? I would love that for you. I feel like you.
1:00:47 Danielle LaRock? It's like this world clearly isn't cutting it for me. I have to seek something else. Um, I don't know. It doesn't elaborate, but that seems weird. I don't know. Like that seems of all of them, I'm, that's kind of the one that I'm like, what?
1:01:00 Cassandra Yahnian? It's interesting. People, I just love that this exists and people like really sat down and put this whole chart together.
1:01:07 Danielle LaRock? Yeah.
1:01:08 Cassandra Yahnian? Of like levels of alien experiences.
1:01:11 Danielle LaRock? The kinds, yeah.
1:01:12 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah. Well.
1:01:14 Cassandra Yahnian? Diverting back to the story a little bit where I said that it seems like other people have been copying Betty and Barney Hill's experience since that they had this and that it has showed up in Hollywood. I had a couple of, I just had an example here. Yeah, so when The X-Files debuted in the 1990s, it leaned heavily on details from Betty and Barney's story. They used experiments conducted aboard sterile spacecraft, implanted memories, government cover-ups, and characters left emotionally fractured by something that they couldn't explain. There's the same tension between belief and denial, memory and distortion, trauma and mystery. Even the way The X-Files explores racial identity, paranoia,
1:01:57 Cassandra Yahnian? and state surveillance owes something to Betty and Barney's experience. So when we watch abduction stories unfold on screen, the flickering lights, the time gaps, the cold metal tables, we're not just seeing fiction, we're actually seeing portions of the retelling of a single night in the White Mountains and the story of what Betty and Barney truly experienced. In the 1970s and 80s, Betty became increasingly involved in not only the UFO community as a frequent speaker and advocate, but also the world of conspiracy theories more broadly. By the time she published her autobiography, A Common Sense Approach to UFOs, in 1980, her view of what happened that night in 1961 had expanded dramatically.
1:02:41 Cassandra Yahnian? Written in third person, the book paints a much broader and much stranger picture than anything she and Barney had originally shared. She claimed to have experienced dozens of additional sightings and described maintaining ongoing, even telepathic, contact with extraterrestrials. She also wrote about so-called "men in black," mysterious government figures who she believed had tried to silence UFO witnesses, and suggested that the US government knew far more about alien activity than it was letting on. Honestly, all of this, she was just a woman before her time, because literally all of this has been talked about now in depth. But her book doesn't stop there. Betty also connected UFOs to reports of animal mutilations,
1:03:26 Cassandra Yahnian? unmarked black helicopters, and even Bigfoot sightings, weaving them into a larger narrative about surveillance, secrecy, and the limits of human understanding. What had once been a single terrifying encounter had grown into something much more expansive, and many in the UFO research community had a harder time taking her seriously because of this book. Despite that, many researchers today, even cautious skeptical ones, still consider the Hills case one of the most credible alien abduction stories ever recorded. Not because it proves anything about aliens necessarily, but because of who the Hills were, how the account emerged, and the remarkable consistency of the details over time. Unlike later abductees,
1:04:10 Cassandra Yahnian? the Hills never sought the spotlight. They didn't spin their story into a book deal right away. They didn't go on speaking tours or build this brand around the experience. They tried at first to keep it private, and when that failed, they tried to tell the story the best that they could. And that's partially why the story probably resonates still today. Their story didn't just raise questions about what might be out there, it raised questions about who we believe and why when someone says they've seen something that despise explanation. Now, if you ever find yourself driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, maybe on a quiet evening when the stars are just coming out, you can stop and visit the place where the story began. Right off Route 3 in front of the Indian Head
1:04:54 Cassandra Yahnian? Resort, there's a green highway plaque with gold lettering commemorating their experience. The plaque reads, "Betty and Barney Hill Incident. On the night of September 19th to 20th, 1961, Portsmouth, New Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two hours of, quote, 'lost'"
1:05:17 Cassandra Yahnian? Time when driving south on Route 3 near Lincoln. They filed an official Air Force Project Blue report of a brightly lit cigar-shaped craft the next day, but were not public with their story until it was leaked in the Boston Traveler in 1965. This was the first widely-reported UFO abduction in the United States. And also where you have years' worth of photos.
1:05:40 Danielle LaRock? Yes.
1:05:41 Cassandra Yahnian? The plaque was installed in 2011 on the 50th anniversary of their abduction after a successful petition led by Betty and Barney's niece Kathleen Martin, who has spent much of her life preserving and defending her aunt and uncle's legacy. It's a small marker. It's easy to miss if you're not looking for it. But for those who know the story, it's a powerful reminder, not just of what may have happened that night, but of how deeply it shaped the lives of two ordinary people who are never quite the same afterwards. So if you ever do make the drive, pull over for a moment. Look up and ask yourself, what would you have done if you had been in that car? Would you have told anyone what you saw? And if you had, do you think that anyone would have believed you?
1:06:25 Cassandra Yahnian? And that is my story of the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill.
1:06:29 Danielle LaRock? Hmm. Well done.
1:06:33 Danielle LaRock? Well done. Worth the wait. Loved it. It's interesting you brought up the niece because there's a UFO festival that happens every year in Exeter, New Hampshire. And I missed her talk two years ago, last year.
1:06:48 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh, no.
1:06:48 Danielle LaRock? I forget which year it was, but um, we were on a trip, as we are usually.
1:06:54 Cassandra Yahnian? What time of year do they do it?
1:06:55 Danielle LaRock? Um, I think it's in the fall. I want to say it's in like September, early September, that the, I mean, there's clearly UFO festivals everywhere, all the time. But there is the closest one to me is in Exeter. And she was a speaker, um, one of the years that I wasn't around. But yeah, it's cool that she's still around doing her thing. And if you have a picture near the sign, I would please tag us in it because I know it well. Cassie will know it well in a couple of weeks. And yeah, the story is super nostalgic. It's one of the first that I remember my dad telling me. And that obviously holds sentimental value for me and. I have the book captured uh that
1:07:37 Cassandra Yahnian? Oh yeah.
1:07:37 Danielle LaRock? Not written by her. It wasn't the one by her or the uh one that came out of the story. I think it's actually kind of relatively recent. It's on my bookshelf. Uh but it's titled captured and um I have yet to read it, but it's on my list. And I'm pretty sure not to call out my mom or anything, but I'm pretty sure she has a UFO story.
1:07:57 Cassandra Yahnian? Really?
1:07:58 Danielle LaRock? Of hers of hers. She is like keeps things kind of close to the chest as far as really being like, I saw a UFO. I think
1:08:07 Cassandra Yahnian? Right. It's a trail tale anonymously.
1:08:09 Danielle LaRock? Mom.
1:08:10 Cassandra Yahnian? Mom.
1:08:10 Danielle LaRock? Well, I know it's you. I but I'll just say it's you. I think it's more, I don't know if there's really anything more to it other than she was driving. Something happened. She can't explain. She saw something that was strange that involved lights like following her car.
1:08:27 Cassandra Yahnian? Interesting.
1:08:28 Danielle LaRock? And then that was kind of it. Like, there's not really anything more to it.
1:08:32 Cassandra Yahnian? That's enough, I think.
1:08:33 Danielle LaRock? I think it's enough. But again, it's been a really long time since she even shared that small portion with me because I, like I said, she, if this was my dad, he'd be like, oh my God. Uh like I'd know every detail. He would fill in the blanks with, you know, things that he thought. And for her, I think she was just like, I'm not sure what it was. It was strange and I can't explain it, but I'm not gonna say it was a UFO.
1:08:54 Cassandra Yahnian? Right.
1:08:55 Danielle LaRock? So.
1:08:56 Cassandra Yahnian? Which I feel like is probably what most people's responses would be.
1:09:01 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. So can't blame her, but I'm pretty sure if there's more to it, mom, you should, sorry to call you up.
1:09:07 Cassandra Yahnian? She's been objected by aliens and has just been like omitting that your whole entire life.
1:09:12 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. And she's just like, let me feel weird my whole life for being super into aliens. Cool. Yeah. Loved it. Thanks for doing it. Thanks for sharing it.
1:09:23 Cassandra Yahnian? Yeah, it was fun to do a more uh just a lighthearted alien. I mean, we haven't like dived into cryptids or like aliens or anything. I feel like in a few months, so. It felt like a fun summer starting story to get out here.
1:09:36 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. And people have their eyes on the sky more this time of year.
1:09:40 Cassandra Yahnian? Hmm.
1:09:40 Danielle LaRock? Just being out and about and out longer and just like spending a lot of time outdoors and um looking up to the skies more. So.
1:09:48 Cassandra Yahnian? And if you're headed to the White Mountains like we are this summer, then you ha- you have a place to add to your list.
1:09:55 Danielle LaRock? Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you, everyone for listening and we will see you next week. In the meantime, enjoy the view. But watch your back. Bye. Bye. Thank you for joining us again this week. If you love National Park After Dark and want to hear exclusive bonus stories, join us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. Patreon subscribers have access to our National Park After Dark Book Club, live streams, Discord, and much more. If you prefer to watch our episodes, video episodes are now available on YouTube. If you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite listening platform. And to follow along with all our adventures, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X at National Park After Dark.
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