Alien Universe (9 page)

Simon hypnotized both Barney and Betty separately to avoid contaminating their recollections. Barney went first. Under hypnosis, he remembered an encounter much like Betty’s dreams. This was two years after the incident, and Barney had no doubt spoken to Betty at length about them, although there were differences in their accounts. Barney remembered the Aliens (for by this time it became clear that Aliens were behind all of this) were short and gray, but without a nose. They spoke to him in English but without moving their mouths. Barney called it “thought transference,” as he was unfamiliar with
the term telepathy. Betty and Barney were examined in different rooms in the saucer. During the examination, the Aliens studied the Hills’ physiology, spending a large amount of time on the pelvic region, including putting a cup of some kind over his genitals to extract a sperm sample and inserting some sort of tube in his anus. Eventually, he was returned to Betty and they both returned to their car, in the manner of sleepwalkers.

Betty recalled similar details to Barney’s during her session. Under hypnosis, both of the Hills’ accounts were closer to each other’s than they were to Betty’s dreams as written down previously. After the examination, Betty asked the Alien where they came from, and he produced a star map. Simon was able to implant a posthypnotic suggestion for her to draw the map, and she did so. Simon also had Barney draw a picture of an Alien while under hypnosis. The hypnosis sessions ended in the summer of 1964, although the Hills and Simon kept in occasional contact through 1965.

Simon’s conclusion was that the recollections were simply a repeat of Betty’s dreams. He did not believe that they had been abducted by aliens. He wrote up the account in the journal
Psychiatric Opinion
and the Hills went about their normal lives, feeling much better now that they felt that they could account for the missing time. The Hills would still talk about their experience with friends and family and the occasional UFO researcher, but they didn’t seek out the media. To this point, the Hill episode was only a curiosity discussed by UFO enthusiasts. This was about to change.

Reporter John Lutrell of the newspaper
The Boston Traveler
had heard of the Hills and obtained a 1963 audio recording of them talking about their experience. He did a little digging and found that they had spoken to Simon and asked for information. Simon and the Hills refused to cooperate, so Lutrell reported with what he had available. On October 25, 1965, he published the paper
UFO Chiller: Did THEY Seize Couple
,” the first of a three-part series. UPI picked up the story on the following day, and the Hills became international celebrities.

The Hills were aghast at the report and decided to tell their story. Writer John Fuller worked with them in 1966. The result was the highly successful
The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours aboard a Flying Saucer
. The book contained some sketches Betty had made of the star map and others that Barney had drawn showing what their captors looked like. Later critics compared the Hill’s account of the appearance of the Aliens with those in an episode of the television show
Outer Limits
, broadcast just a few days before the relevant hypnotic session (
figure 2.3
).

FIGURE 2.3
.
Barney Hill’s drawing of the alien he believed he saw (
left
) is the progenitor of the public’s modern concept of Aliens. The middle figure appeared in “The Bellero Shield,” an episode of the television show
Outer Limits
, and is thought by some to be the inspiration for Barney’s drawing. The figure on the right is from the 2011 movie
Paul
and shows a modern depiction of a typical Alien.
Copyright John G. Fuller (
left
), United Artists Television (
middle
), Universal Pictures (
right
)
.

In 1968, amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish read
The Interrupted Journey
and was interested in the star map. Over a period of 5 years, she made a three-dimensional model of stars near Earth, using beads and string. She even visited Betty Hill in the summer of 1969 (Barney having died earlier that year) to get as much information as possible. When the model was complete, she walked around the model with Betty’s map in her hand. She finally found an angle that seemed to match. She concluded that the Aliens had come from Zeta Reticuli, specifically Zeta Reticuli 1, as it is a binary star system.

This hypothesis reached the editor of
Astronomy Magazine
and, for the first time, this magazine published a UFO story in December 1974. It compared contemporary astronomical knowledge, including all sunlike stars within a sphere centered on the Solar System with a 55 light-year radius, to Fish’s map. The article concluded that the reconstruction was pretty good. Companion articles discussed the metallicity of the stars in the Hill map as identified by Fish. Zeta Reticuli 1 and 2 are deficient in metals (60% that of the sun, using the astronomer’s definition of metals as “everything that isn’t hydrogen and helium”). This doesn’t rule out these stars as a host for a technologically advanced species, but it does make it harder. After all, you need metal to make flying saucers and other elements to make the Aliens themselves. In addition, over the course of the following year, there was active discussion in the letters to the editor column, including contributions by Carl Sagan and his research associate Steve Soter.

Another way the public heard the Hills’ story was the 1975 made for TV
movie called
The UFO Incident
. The dramatization was an approximately faithful depiction of
The Interrupted Journey
. Whether or not the Hills encountered Aliens that night, their story is the archetype for Alien abduction stories: the amnesia, the examination, the fascination with the human pelvic region, the small gray humanoids, the big black eyes. In short, Betty and Barney Hill told us what Aliens look like.

Ancient Aliens

Carl Sagan is not a name that one normally associates with terrible science, but it is possible that he had an unintentional hand in launching a surge of books that advanced the theory that not only has the Earth been visited by Aliens but that these visits began thousands of years ago. In a 1966 book
Intelligent Life in the Universe
, astrophysicists Carl Sagan and Iosif Schklovsky included a chapter devoted to urging the archaeological community to be open to the idea that the Earth had been visited by ancient astronauts in the past. They didn’t claim that it had happened, but simply that it was a possibility to be considered. Other authors weren’t as cautious in their claims.

Erich von Däniken is a Swiss author who has the distinction of being the person who blasted the idea of ancient astronauts into the public consciousness. His 1968 book
Chariots of the Gods
was a smash success, with some 20 million books sold to date, and he has published nearly twenty books in English. He has also been jailed three times for fraud and theft. A criminal record is not a reason to a priori dismiss a person’s ideas but, given the outlandish nature of von Däniken’s claims, a record that includes fraud is presumably a relevant bit of information.

The central thesis of his books is that there is tremendous evidence for Alien visitation in the archaeological and historical record. He suggested that in the Christian Bible, the chariot of Ezekiel was a report of a UFO as seen by Bronze Age eyes. He interpreted the lid of a sarcophagus of a Mayan king as depicting an astronaut piloting his craft. The Great Pyramids of Giza, the Nazca Lines in Peru, Stonehenge, the huge heads on Easter Island— there aren’t many interesting large ancient monuments that have eluded his speculation.

Few, if any, archaeologists give any credibility to von Däniken’s theories. Most of his claims have been debunked, and von Däniken himself has conceded in interviews and in documentaries that some of his claims were false, embellished, or since discredited. Here are some examples. A picture in
Chariots of the Gods
is claimed to be reminiscent of a runway and parking areas for
spaceships. Closer inspection shows that the picture in the book was cropped in a quite misleading way and that the parking areas were just too small to park much of anything, with the “runway” being 8 to 10 feet across and the “parking lot” being not much bigger. In his book
Gold of the Gods
, he tells of an expedition in which he was guided through tunnels containing gold, statues, and a library in a cave in Ecuador.

In an interview in the December 1974 issue of
Playboy
and again in the 1978
Nova
episode “The Case of the Ancient Astronauts,” he admits to not actually having been in the cave and having embellished his story to make it more interesting. In the same documentary, he defends a museum in which carvings reported to be thousands of years old are stored. The documentary’s producer located a local sculptor who claimed to have made the carvings and who re-created some of them for the camera. It should be stressed that von Däniken did not participate in this fraud, which seems to have been the work of a local entrepreneur out to make a buck, but von Däniken clearly isn’t one for letting something as inconvenient as the truth get in the way of a good story.

The
Playboy
interview should be required reading for von Däniken enthusiasts, as it clearly demonstrates a shockingly cavalier attitude toward disciplined investigation. Even though von Däniken has conceded that many of his claims in his books didn’t stand up to even casual scrutiny, later versions of his books remain uncorrected. It would seem that diligent scholarship isn’t an important consideration for these publications.

Regardless of the veracity of his claims, there is no question that von Däniken’s books had a huge impact on the public. This impact was amplified by a subsequent German language film version of his book
Chariots of the Gods
. This film was subsequently edited, dubbed into English, and shown in 1973 on American television under the name
In Search of Ancient Astronauts
with
Twilight Zone’s
Rod Serling doing the narration.

Von Däniken is not the only author to postulate ancient Aliens. In his 1976 book
The Sirius Mystery
, Robert Temple tells of the Dogon tribe in Mali who are reported to have long believed that the star Sirius has a companion that orbits the main star with a period of 50 years. Western astronomy discovered a faint companion star in 1862 that is invisible to the naked eye. As it happens, this star has an orbital period of about 50 years. Temple took this interesting bit of information and added claims about the origins of the culture of ancient Egypt and Greece, to name but a few. Temple didn’t say he was certain that ancient astronauts gave the Dogon their knowledge, as an earlier, undiscovered,
human culture with advanced technology could also explain the mystery. Temple did say that he thought that the Alien hypothesis was the more likely of the two.

Naturally, some anthropologists criticize the ethnographical studies on which Temple based his book, stating that the Dogon did not have a multicentury fascination with Sirius. Others claim that the origins of the knowledge of Sirius B stems from cross-cultural pollination, specifically from Europe (and possibly from the original ethnographers). Temple’s book didn’t penetrate the public consciousness the way von Däniken’s book did, and so we leave it without deeper discussion.

The idea of ancient astronauts has certainly entered the public awareness. This can be seen in the 1994 movie
Stargate
, in which the ancient Egyptian civilization was modeled on Alien visitors to Earth millennia ago. The movie spawned three television shows with more than 250 episodes, spanning 14 years. We will revisit this series in
chapter 4
.

Aliens Today

In this chapter, we have taken a whirlwind tour through what we might call “Alien-ology.” The incidents here are by no means the only tales of Alien contact there have been, nor are they the first. The stories here are not even selected as being ones that are plausible. They were selected as the stories that grabbed the public’s attention and shaped our collective vision.

There are still people who believe in all of the tales told here and in many others. In the next two chapters, we’ll tell the story of Aliens in fiction and relate the fiction to these tales of supposedly true extraterrestrial contact. But perhaps it is worthwhile to list the most common forms of Aliens that one will encounter if one attends a UFO convention. (Note that we will repeat this exercise at the end of the next chapter to include Aliens that come mostly from science fiction.) The typical aliens are:

Little green men
. These are not terribly common anymore and originated more in the fiction of the early twentieth century. LGM were diminutive humanoids, sometimes with antennae. They were the precursors of the Grays.