Barney and Betty Hill Captured

The first story of alleged alien abduction took place in 1961 and burst upon the public in the mid-1960s. Barney and Betty Hill were a married couple who had a "missing time" period that bothered Barney enough that they consulted a Boston psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon. Dr. Simon used hypnosis as a tool to aid Barney's memory. He also hypnotised Betty as a check on Barney's story. The classic alien abduction story emerged, told from each person's perspective.

UFO skeptics tend to dismiss alien abduction stories as fantasies influenced by images current in popular culture. People are "abducted" by little gray humanoids, they say, because that's the image society has of aliens. Well, that wasn't especially the case when the Hills went to see Dr. Simon, and yet both described small beings with large heads. The dominance of the Grays in UFO literature, it can be argued, began with the Hills' story. Maybe all subsequent stories of Gray abductions are therefore suspect-- or maybe there's a more direct explanation.

Kathleen Marden, a niece of the Hills, and Stanton Friedman, prominent UFO researcher, have just published a book about the alleged abduction. Entitled Captured, the book uses transcripts made from tapes of the hypnosis sessions to examine the incident. The book might be worth a look. At the least, it looks at one of the central stories in one of the stronger and strangest social phenomena of the last half of the twentieth century.