It is not usually easy to validate claims made by UFO witnesses, and it is especially difficult in cases where an abduction appears to have taken place. The real complication occurs when hypnosis is used to investigate lost time in conjunction with abduction.
In the case of the well-known kidnapping of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist with a long history of using medical hypnosis to retrieve repressed memories of traumatic experiences, conducted many individual hypnosis sessions. three years later. , especially those that occurred on the battlefield during World War II. Simon knew nothing about UFOs, but felt it was his duty to obtain details from Betty and Barney under very deep hypnosis to try to determine what happened during their encounter with a strange space vehicle and eleven alien beings.
Following the suppressed emotion released by the Hills while they were in their separate hypnotic states, Simon induced amnesia in each of them to prevent them from discussing what they were beginning to remember. This allowed for careful cross-comparison between his various accounts.
A key validating revelation was Betty’s conversation with an alien about a three-dimensional model or map (probably a hologram) that was shown to her after she asked where they were from. There was a pattern of a dozen lights (stars) connected with three types of lines indicating heavy trade routes, light trade routes, and occasional expeditions. Betty knew little about astronomy and was unable to explain where she was on the model. Simon instructed her to draw it after she pointed out that he could remember what it looked like. Later, John G. Fuller included the drawing in his best-selling book, The Interrupted Journey.
At first there seemed to be no way to determine if the map had any meaning. After all, our galaxy, the Milky Way, has at least two hundred billion stars. Fortunately, a bright woman, Marjorie Fish, visited Betty to get more details about the map, even though Fish had doubts about the Hills’ claim that the alien beings were humanoid. However, over a period of a few years and further interviews with Betty, Fish built around twenty-six different three-dimensional models of fishing line and beads. Her goal was to find a three-dimensional pattern that matched the two-dimensional pattern Betty had drawn.
Betty and Barney had impressed me favorably when we met in Pittsburgh in 1968 and when I read The Interrupted Journey and Fuller’s Look Magazine articles about the hills. My colleague, Coral Lorenzen, international director of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, one of the two major UFO groups at the time, asked me as a scientist to help Fish communicate the results of her research. I agreed and visited her during one of my speaking tours. I also helped explain her work at a meeting at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and during a presentation at a Mutual UFO Network Symposium in Akron.
Believing that Fish was objective and credible, I published the first article on her work in Saga magazine and later arranged an interview with her and Betty for my documentary, “UFOs Are Real.” I also convinced the editor of Astronomy magazine, Terence Dickinson, to talk to her and publish an article, “The Zeta Reticuli Incident,” about her work. Ultimately, she received more response than any article Astronomy has published, before or since.
Also featured in my documentary was an Ohio State University astronomy professor, Dr. George Mitchell, who had helped Fish produce very tight star catalogues. He used one of his large models as a teaching tool and tested his care and precision in building the models.
Through his detailed and careful investigation, he was eventually able to identify all the stars in the pattern and discovered that all the stars in the pattern were like the sun (despite the fact that less than 5 percent of the stars within 55 light-years of the Sun). sun are like the sun). Some stars are too old, too new, too bright, too dim, or vary too much in the intensity of their rate of energy production to resemble the Sun, or have very close companion stars that make it difficult to maintain stable planetary orbits in space. neighborhood. The stars in the pattern are also, surprisingly, in one plane, like slices of pepperoni on a thin pizza rather than scattered like raisins on a loaf of raisin bread. This makes traveling between the stars much easier. The pattern is definitely not random.
Most remarkably, Fish identified the base stars as Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli in the southern sky constellation Reticulum, but only after obtaining and using much better data on distances to nearby stars to rebuild the models. No one building a model before Hill’s experience would have gotten the correct identification. A unique pair, Zeta 1 and 2 Reticuli are the closest pair of sun-like stars in our entire local neighborhood. They are only 1/8 of a light-year apart from each other, just 39.2 light-years from Earth, and a billion years older than the sun. These two stars had never been singled out as special before Fish’s discoveries. It makes sense that they are the hub of the local neighborhood.
The cosmic perspective for the intelligent inhabitants of a planet around Zeta 1 or 2 Reticuli would be very different from that of an earthling, since the sun is thirty-five times further from the nearest star than the distance between Zeta 1 and Zeta 2. Earthlings are in the suburbs with no other stars nearby. However, from a planet orbiting either of these stars, the other star is visible to the naked eye throughout the day, and the planets around the other star would be directly observable. No inferences would be necessary. Even with our primitive equipment, at such a close distance we were able to determine, from the composition of the atmosphere around these planets, whether biological activity was present.
The residents of Zeta 1 and 2 would have a much greater incentive to undertake interstellar travel than we have here on Earth. They would also have had much more time to develop advanced travel technology with their billion-year head start on us. Technological progress invariably comes from doing things differently and unpredictably, and we primitives have already determined methods of traveling to the stars.
The star map work done by Marjorie Fish was a crucial factor, along with others, in the general acceptance of the Hill abduction story. Her work was also targeted by detractors and skeptics, including Carl Sagan, who misrepresented Fish’s methods and her results. These attacks, along with many others in the Hill case, such as on the TV show “Cosmos,” are discussed in detail in my book, co-authored with Betty’s niece Kathleen Marden, Captured!: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction, Betty and Barney Hill’s UFO Experience.