Summary

Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial married couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, whose September 19-20, 1961 experience on U.S. Route 3 became the first widely publicized CE4 case in the United States. Returning from a vacation in Niagara Falls and Montreal, they observed a large craft with illuminated windows and apparent occupants before arriving home approximately two hours later than expected with no memory of a 35-mile stretch of road and a number of physical anomalies. Under separate hypnotic regression sessions with Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon - a leading specialist in hypnotherapy - both independently described broadly consistent accounts of being taken aboard a craft and medically examined. Betty drew a sketch of a star map shown to her during the encounter; amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish later identified the map as a plausible match for the Zeta Reticuli binary star system. The case was documented in John Fuller's 1966 bestseller 'The Interrupted Journey' and the 1975 NBC television film. It remains the foundational reference for the abduction research tradition that Budd Hopkins, John Mack, and others subsequently developed.

Roles

• -Betty: Social worker, New Hampshire Division of Welfare
• -Barney: U.S. Postal Service employee; New Hampshire member, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
• -CE4 experiencers; subjects of the first widely publicized abduction case in the United States

Organizations

Education

• -Betty: University of New Hampshire (Social Work)
• -Barney: Self-educated; active in civil rights organizations

Early Career

• -Betty worked as a social worker for the New Hampshire Division of Welfare
• -Barney worked for the U.S. Postal Service and was active in the Portsmouth NAACP and the New Hampshire chapter of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
• -As an interracial couple in 1961, they faced significant social scrutiny - a context in which fabricating a story inviting further public attention would have been contrary to their interests