Ep. 8: IKEA Aliens WITH SPECIAL GUEST!: The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill

Shannon: Hi.
Emma: Hello. I'm Emma.
Shannon: I'm Shannon.
Liam: And I'm Liam.
Emma: My little brother is here, which is exciting. And I will put all of our mess up somewhere are in this because that was too funny.
Shannon: Happy holidays.
Emma: Happy holidays. This will come out after Thanksgiving, but.
Shannon: It is till the holiday.
Emma: The day after Thanksgiving.
Liam: Happy holiday season.
Emma: Tis the season. But Liam is here to help us with today's topic, um which we'll get into in a second. But, Liam, how are you feeling?
Liam: I'm feeling pretty nice. I'm a little cold. A little hot. A little apprehensive between a fan and a warmer place.
Emma: Yes, we do have a fan on, so I apologize if you can hear it. Um it's too warm in this haunted space. We are in my mother's studio. Um she's a photographer, but um the space that she has is both haunted and obnoxiously hot. So we have a fan on in order to make sure that we don't die.
Liam: I guess if you want to block out the sound, I guess with the rest of the subject that I was only made vaguely aware of, you can consider it the background radiation of the universe.
Emma: Yes. Liam has done no research for this, which is exactly what I wanted you to do.
Liam: I didn't want you to know anything.
Emma: Yeah, and that's been very protective.
Shannon: Anytime she's been on her computer this week and neither of us has walked by. She has shut the lid and said, go away.
Emma: Stop it. Do not look.
Shannon: And I was like, I'm not even trying to look.
Emma: Well, and I don't know how much of this particular incident either of you know. I don't know how much of it.
Liam: You guys, I remember reading a book once. It was like a fun, big, thick book about phenomenon. There was a whole section about universe.
Emma: Like, in that universe, there's a whole.
Liam: Section about aliens in the universe, but specifically the ones that came to see us and kidnap people.
Emma: Yeah. So he was made aware that it is aliens, as was Shannon, but I probably have nothing.
Shannon: I know nothing.
Emma: Today we are talking about the abduction of Benny and Barney Hill, which is the very first recorded in modern history. Um abduction and return of humans by extraterrestrial beings.
Shannon: Emma.
Emma: Yes.
Shannon: You said aliens, which means our friends at home can cross off aliens on their bingo card. Reminder to go to the link in our Instagram bio and download your bingo card for this episode. And play along, please. Screenshot it and tag us if you play.
Emma: We'd love to see it. Please. You should do that.
Liam: Okay, I will, I guess.
Emma: How many of these have you actually listened to?
Liam: I think I listened to a random one. It was like the third or the fourth one.
Emma: Okay, well, you're going to have to listen to this one. You're in. If you don't listen to this one, I'm going to be real disappointed in you. All right, well, this is probably, in terms of notes, going to be a little bit shorter than usual. But that's only because we have a guest, and I don't want to take up too much of your time uh because you have homework to do.
Liam: Yes, I have an exam on the second.
Emma: I'll wish you luck. I'm so glad I'm not in College anymore. Yes.
Liam: Goodbye.
Emma: All right, so let's get into this. Buckle in, everybody. Okay. Good job. That was silent.
Liam: It was a requirement.
Emma: Participation. I muted it. All right, so on the evening of September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving back home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from a trip to Canada when an unidentifiable craft, after stalking them as they drove, blocked their visibility, then moved to Hover over them. The Hills car vibrated, and after a moment of dull memory, found that they had traveled almost 35 miles south down the road and 2 hours had passed. The Hills believed that they had been abducted by extraterrestrial beings.
Liam: Do they know that it was not the Canadian police? I think it could have been the.
Emma: Canadian police in there in their little mountain uniform.
Liam: In their little mountain uniforms. We don't know. I feel like there's not enough money going towards what the Canadians are up to.
Emma: Okay.
Shannon: But my thought just on that little.
Emma: Short blurb that you said is that.
Shannon: Uh this is in New Hampshire.
Emma: Yes.
Shannon: And that's where Maura Murray disappeared. So maybe she got abducted by aliens.
Emma: Oh, honestly, that was the theory I did not expound upon during that episode. But, yeah, that is a possibility. Call back. Yeah. All right, so let's get into the Hills as people. So there is an massive amount of other people. Yes. We have recorded evidence that they are people.
Liam: They could be double agents. They could be working for both sides.
Emma: Who knows? Like aliens being aliens.
Liam: They could be alien people, centrists. What they could be like trying to look at both sides of both people and aliens and maybe try to find, like, a healthy middle.
Emma: But are they human?
Shannon: What are they? What is their identity?
Liam: That's a good question. That's what we're going to find out. Exactly.
Emma: All right. Okay, so there is an amount of amount of information on the couple before this alleged encounter, but Barney Hill, a black man from Newport News, Virginia, was working for the US Postal Service while his wife, Eunice Elizabeth Betty Hill, was a white woman from Newton, New Hampshire.
Shannon: Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.
Emma: Oh, the gigantic air conditioner just turned on.
Shannon: It's a ghost.
Emma: This place is haunted.
Liam: It is haunted. Definitively haunted.
Emma: That was just an air conditioner, which.
Liam: Actually feels really turned on by a ghost.
Emma: But please don't hurt yourself. If you die, mom will kill me.
Shannon: But we would have it on record, uh which is.
Liam: I like how you're concerned my demise. If you were punishment.
Emma: Yes. Ever since you were a kid, man, all right. So let's get back into things after that interlude. So you niece, Elizabeth. Betty Hill, a white woman from Newton, New Hampshire, was a social worker. They were both active members of the NAACP and were community leaders in the civil rights movement. They were really involved in their Unitarian Church. They now lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and were, by all accounts, very happy. They um had a spontaneous trip to Niagara Falls and Montreal and had spent a nice three day vacation there. On September 19, we're driving back through New Hampshire to head back home with their dog, a dachshund named Delphi. And there's an adorable picture of the two of them holding their little puppy. It is very cute.
Shannon: Are we putting it on the Instagram?
Emma: It definitely will be on the instant. Okay, good. They had been married for only a year and a couple of months, so the trip for them was like a small honeymoon. It was fairly spontaneous, but they wanted to do something once they went up to Niagara Falls, Montreal, and then we're like, all right, we got to head home. And this wasn't like a route that they were unfamiliar with, so uh they knew just how long it was going to take them. So let's talk about the incident. Twilight zone.
Shannon: I think whatever.
Liam: Twilight zone something.
Emma: All right, so it was about 10:30 p.m. When just south of Lancaster, New Hampshire, Betty saw a bright light in the sky that moved up from below the uh balloon.
Liam: What balloon?
Emma: Are we talking about?
Shannon: A hot air balloon festival happening.
Liam: Is there a hot air balloon just hanging around?
Shannon: Was it a weather balloon?
Emma: No. Although maybe so. Betty saw a bright light in the sky um that moved from below the moon and upward.
Shannon: What if the moon is a balloon?
Emma: What if the moon is the alien fake?
Liam: What if they're blinded by the moon?
Emma: Blinded by the moon?
Liam: Just up like a Moose and attacked by the police?
Shannon: I got it.
Emma: Betty thought at first that it was a falling star, but as it continued to move upward, she became suspicious that her reasoning was incorrect. Because falling stars don't fall upwards. They kind of also um just quickly disappear. And this was maintaining itself. Barney saw it, too, and Betty urged Barney to stop so that they could have a closer look at the light became bigger and brighter. Barney pulled over at a scenic picnic area just below Twin Mountain, and the light had seemingly followed them, and he used his binoculars to try and figure out what it was. Barney remembers seeing through the binoculars that it was no aircraft. It was a thin disk with lights all around it, and he could see humanoid figures on the craft through, like windows. So they returned to their car and kept driving when they started to hear a vibrating and humming sound, as well as what sounded as if it was like code, like buzzing sound. So it sounded like almost like they.
Liam: Were trying to send a message.
Emma: Yeah. Hitting and pinging off the trunk of their car. The back of their car.
Liam: Bizarre.
Emma: The next thing they knew, they were 35 miles down the road and had lost 2 hours. They only realized this when they returned home to Portsmouth because both of their watches had stopped working. They could not get these watches to start working again. The trip was well known, as I said, and um it was supposed to take 4 hours, but instead took seven. So they were like, okay, this is not obviously something happened. Betty noticed that her dress was torn in places. The zipper had been pulled, and there was pink powder on her dress, which when she hung it up on the line, the pink powder just, like, disappeared into the wind. So she was, like, just sitting on her dress, which was odd. Barney's shoes were so badly worn at the toes that he had to buy new ones. They were, like, really scuffed up at the toes so he could buy new ones. Barney's binocular strap was torn, but he doesn't remember it happening before the incident, so you could wear it. It was completely snapped. Barney apparently felt compelled to check himself over in the bathroom, but found nothing. And both of them felt really dirty. And they felt compelled to shower and bathe themselves extensively. Both of them drew a picture of what they had seen as what the craft looked like because they just felt so compelled to figure out what the heck was this? Because what they remember is everything before the 2 hours were gone, right? So both of them were fairly paranoid for the next few weeks. They even kept their luggage next to the front door and were kind of scared to touch it. Betty insisted on leaving the luggage there. They also found concentric circles on their car's trunk that hadn't been there the day before. And when they experimented with a Compass near them, the closer to the spot the Compass was, the more wild the needle went, which I find really funny that they were like, all right, this is all odd, but I want to test something.
Liam: I want to test one thing.
Emma: I wonder uh why using a Compass was their first inclination.
Liam: Did they think it was something magnetic? I guess because that's the only thing.
Emma: Well, obviously it was. Otherwise the needle wouldn't go crazy.
Liam: Did they test this afterwards?
Emma: I have no. I couldn't find anything other than their account, their account, what had happened. Okay, so after calling family to explain what had happened, or more so to try and talk it out because they were like, we don't know what happened. It was suggested to them that they call the local Peace Air Force Base, and Peace is spelled P-E-A-S-E not like Peace. To see if there was anything that they could do to help explain the craft is what we saw, something that you guys were doing nearby, and Betty called them the day after, so she called them on the 20th. And so the official Air Force base report that recorded their sighting on September 22, this is when the report was made. Called it a strange incident involving an unidentified flying object. Apparently, radar at night had actually picked up on an identified object, and there um was a recorded visual sighting as well. But the reader I can't talk. The ghost is entering me and just.
Liam: Going trying to sabotage the podcast integrity.
Emma: The radar, however, could have picked up a false reading as the return on the radar was pretty weak, so they're not sure if it was actually something hanging out. Mhm a Major Paul W. Henderson telephoned the Hills for a detailed interview and guessed that they must have misidentified the planet Jupiter in the sky, which was later changed to, quote optical condition in his report. I have never once seen Jupiter.
Shannon: I feel like when we see planets, it's like, oh, you see that very bright star looking thing?
Liam: That's a planet, specifically, the one that everyone is able to see is like Mars because it's red and Venus is the morning star.
Shannon: But the moon is the biggest thing that you look at.
Liam: The moon is like the one everybody's um got to know, okay, Jupiter feels.
Shannon: Like a little the moon is so far away and so small. It's not that you would make a mistake.
Liam: I also like the idea that Jupiter had little people on it and came down and then made them lose 2 hours.
Emma: It wouldn't have been that Jupiter was large enough to the naked eye to make you think that you were being abducted.
Liam: Um if we were talking about only the movement or something, okay, they wouldn't have been moving that fast. They probably would have seen it. Maybe they were misidentifying it. They could have had some kind of thing going on with their windshield. But I think the lost time is the one thing that it's bizarre, but also it's one of those things like, have you ever been just driving back from a place that you drove to and you're like, wow, that was short. I must have lost a few hours.
Emma: No, I've never had that experience before.
Liam: I got distracted. When you're driving back from Rhode Island, like this summer, you were not driving. I was not driving.
Speaker UNK: Yeah.
Emma: So granted, it's different when you're driving.
Liam: It's different when you're driving. But then I just recall just like, looking around and being like, hey, we really jumped through some States.
Emma: What the report regarded Barney specifically to be very honest and serious in his testimony to the sighting. But there was no official conclusion to what they had seen that night. Basically, the report is saying, yeah, they believe that they saw this, but we can't confirm anything about what they saw.
Shannon: But you also didn't deny it.
Emma: Yeah, Barney himself developed extreme anxiety and even ulcers, which were making it very hard to maintain the normal rhythm of life. So he was having a very hard time. So let's get into Betty's dreams. These are very specific to the incident as well.
Liam: Who knows?
Emma: So ten days after the incident, Betty started to have very vivid dreams. They happened every night for five nights, and then they never happened again. She never had a dream with any of these plot points or things in it ever again. When she mentioned them to Barney, he was sympathetic, but basically just believed that they were bad dreams. So he didn't think that they were in connection to anything. So in November, which let's remember that this incident happened in September. In November, she started to write down the details of what she had dreamt in September.
Shannon: Well, that's a little no.
Emma: Let's continue. In one dream, there was a roadblock on the road they had been driving on and men had surrounded them. She lost consciousness and um tried to regain it. She found herself being forced by two small men to walk into the forest. And seeing Barney walking behind her in what seemed like a trance. The men were about my height, so about five, four, five, which I'm right in between um five, four and a half. Very important.
Liam: I remember my dream last night. We were just being led into the woods by these really uh tiny dudes. Just astoundingly small. They're so small, I wanted to pack their little heads.
Emma: Okay. So they wore matching blue uniforms and flat kit that has. So they have like a sharp bill almost. But are flat ish on top.
Liam: Oh, yeah.
Emma: So not a flat cap, but like.
Liam: A little bit raised like fifty s. Sixty s officers.
Emma: Yeah, exactly like the officer and a gentleman. Kind of.
Liam: I hope aliens have uniforms.
Emma: Right? Any uniforms that are very much like of American design.
Liam: Because it would be weird if they.
Emma: Were naked and if they were wearing berets.
Shannon: Forget about it.
Liam: What are they like, artists? They're artisans. They're always bunch of delicious. The only thing the aliens are interested in is like, cultural exports from France. That's why they were up there. Where were they?
Emma: They're in New Hampshire.
Liam: New Hampshire. But they were around like French Canadian.
Emma: Okay.
Liam: Uh they were just like. That's how they learned to communicate. They speak English. French accents.
Emma: Okay, I'm interested. Know what you think about the aliens accent.
Liam: The aliens accent. Well, they have to communicate with us somehow. Yeah, we really have an alien accent.
Emma: What would an alien accent sound like?
Liam: Swedish. 30 Swedish. It's like they just be like, yes.
Shannon: Secretly just an alien installation.
Emma: You're sorry.
Liam: That's what they do. They try to get you in there so that you'll walk around and look for furniture.
Emma: Something somewhere.
Liam: I don't know. Maybe you stuck in one of those little closet displays. I've wanted to get stuck in one of those closets I could live in.
Emma: They do them so well.
Liam: I know.
Shannon: I want someone to do a challenge where they try and live and live.
Emma: And I think that someone has done that.
Liam: Don't get kicked out of an Ikea challenge, though. I'm always worried that if you walk into one of those displays, you'll go in there and be like, oh, cool, fake laptop. And then you turn around and then there's four walls pushed in, walls on you.
Emma: And it's like they're like, do you.
Shannon: Want a new PS five? Here's a fake one. And you're like, oh, and then chunk chicken. Everyone's speaking to you.
Liam: Um and they're like, now you're going to test these meatballs.
Emma: Test zip tests.
Liam: Test zip balls.
Emma: Okay, let's get back to the story. Because she describes them a little bit further to say that they looked almost human, but they had prominent noses, bluish lips, and Gray skin. She also said their hair and their eyes were dark.
Liam: Okay.
Emma: All right. Are you black hair, black eyes. All right. In all of her dreams, they all walked up a ramp to enter a metallic disc shaped craft, which is just.
Shannon: A hard phrase to say.
Emma: Once they were inside, Barney and Betty were separated at protests. But the quote leader said that examining them together would take longer, and so they were brought to different rooms. Betty then had another man. She says, man alien conduct the exam with the leader and the person who is conducting the exam. She keeps calling the examiner, but she said he was pleasant and calm. He attempted to uh communicate in English, but it was really imperfect. And Betty had difficulty understanding him in the dream, but gathered that the tests were conducted to figure out the differences between humans and the occupants of the craft. So they were communicating in English. I don't know what accident. Maybe they had such a thick accent that she couldn't understand them.
Liam: I'm telling you, it's like alien Duolingo or something. They were all polishing it up. They were like, I had an 82 day streak. I'm ready to go. And it's just like the supermarkets. That's German. But regardless.
Shannon: Both of you took German. You live in Germany?
Emma: I have two twice.
Liam: So really, you can't.
Shannon: I currently have a 200 Sunday streak on Duolingo German, but I keep repeating the same lessons over. The leader's going to send you out.
Liam: The leader is going to send you out to go. Got some German people.
Emma: My gosh. All right. So the tests included a bright light shown on her face, which I'm guessing is to just make her eyes dialing. What's going on? I don't know.
Shannon: What would a light has to do with ASMR?
Liam: I don't know.
Emma: They always do the same audio.
Liam: I'll see people.
Emma: Hello.
Shannon: Welcome to.
Liam: Well, I see people. Like, for example, my roommate. I just saw him casually watching an ASMR video once. I asked him what he was doing. He was like, I just wanted to see what it was all about. And then I saw him moving a flashlight from different parts of the thing. Like a visual thing. You're supposed to follow the light like they make you do in a doctor's office. But that's just a test.
Emma: Like being hypnotized.
Liam: Pretty much.
Emma: Good to know.
Shannon: Is your roommate it a cult?
Liam: No. He watches an ungodly amount of YouTube. Not even ungodly. He was just curious. He could be, who knows?
Shannon: Keep an eye on him.
Liam: Okay, I'll keep an eye out. Yeah.
Emma: All right, so they put her in a chair the examiner cut off.
Shannon: What was the name of the chair.
Liam: Uh.
Emma: That was completely lost on me?
Liam: She sat down in number 244. Bazookton.
Shannon: We're so sorry. If there's anyone from Germany, France, Sweden, everyone.
Liam: New Hampshire, all of Europe.
Emma: All right, so they put her in this mortgage board, and the examiner cut off a lock of her hair to be for safekeeping. Yeah. Examined her ears, eyes, mouth, teeth, throat and hands. Trimmed her fingernails and kept the fingernails, looked over her legs and feet, and then uh used a dull letter opener looking knife, which is how she described it, to scrape some of her skin onto a film that looked like cellophane. But I'm like, how are you scraping skin? You're just cutting into my flesh.
Liam: Use some lotion, man.
Emma: Like scraping skin.
Liam: Scraping skin. If you just don't moisturize, you'll get kind of. It's true. You can only just uh scrape off dead skin.
Shannon: That's what most people, they're like, oh, the victim had skin under their fingernails.
Emma: Um but I'm just trying to think through if she saw it on the.
Shannon: Cellophane looking um film, I think maybe she didn't see it, like the little hard folds or whatever. But what could they be doing? Maybe just trace amounts filled in the blank.
Liam: Maybe it sounds like she went to a doctor's office and then got, like, a manicure by just a bunch of weird Swedish people.
Emma: Okay, anyway, we'll stop dunking on the Swedes, but, like, you know. All right, so in order to test her nervous system, she said the examiner thrust a needle into her belly button, which was completely agonizing. But then the leader passed his hand over her eyes, and the pain went away. You don't feel any pain anymore.
Shannon: You want to know the visual that went through my head? Of course. It's your parents fancy faucet in the kitchen that you put your hand over and the water starts and you put.
Emma: Your hand over it again, and.
Shannon: And it.
Emma: It stops.
Liam: Stops. And it's like $200 more expensive than a regular Foster.
Emma: It currently doesn't work.
Liam: It does not work.
Emma: It's been picking and choosing when it wants to.
Liam: It chooses people.
Shannon: I've been chosen.
Emma: All right, so the examiner left the room, and Betty then talked to the leader, and she picked up what she recognized as a book from uh a row of them with strange symbols uh on it, and the leader said she could take it with her. So when she asked where he came from, he pulled down a map from the wall that was dotted with what looks like stars. She's like, explain, this is where I've come from.
Liam: He was ready.
Emma: He had a little bit, too.
Liam: This is not the first time this has happened. Yeah. By the 8th abduction, they were like, look, we really got to stop describing her Beetlejuices and just show them.
Emma: So at the end of the dream, as Betty and Barney were taken out to return to their car, the men, quote, escorting them, broke out into a disagreement about the book that Betty had wanted to take with her. The leader told her to give it back and that the others had decided they didn't want her to remember the encounter. Betty insisted that even if they took the book, nothing they did could make her forget what happened. And the Hills were taken back to their car, and the leader told them to wait until the craft left before they continued their drive home.
Shannon: Can I tell you what went into my brain when you started the sentence? The men broke out into song. My brain was going uh dance. I did an argument.
Liam: It um would have made an already unforgettable night even more forgettable.
Emma: It's.
Liam: Like the last thing they did.
Shannon: Sweet.
Liam: It's all coming together.
Emma: We're very good at this. Then they decide that after being urged by members of Nicap, which is the National Investigations Committee on Aerial phenomena.
Liam: Okay.
Emma: Nightcap nightcap. Betty had found um a book in the library that was written by the guy who started Nicap and had written a letter to him to be like, this happened to us. And so he helped her get in contact with other members of NICAB to talk to, and then they got her in touch with a hypnotist. So they decided uh that in order to retrieve repressed memories, because obviously, they don't remember the 2 hours that they lost that they were going to undergo hypnosis. So they were referred uh to Benjamin Simon in Boston, and they met him on December 14, 1963. So this is now two years after their encounter. Simon initially determined that the encounter, mhm though he didn't believe that it was extraterrestrials, was causing Barney a lot more stress than he was willing to admit. So, like ulcers and crap. And it was obvious to him that both Betty and Barney um genuinely believed that they had witnessed a UFO with humanlike occupants. The hypnosis sessions, specifically the process of hypnotic regression, began January 4, 1964, and lasted through June 6, 1964. So they went back and forth for many sessions. Each of the Hills were hypnotized several times, always separately, and did not retain any memory of the sessions after each one was conducted. So they don't remember the sessions happening.
Liam: Okay. Interesting.
Emma: Yeah. So let's talk about Barney's sessions under hypnosis. Yes, I know.
Liam: Like an album.
Shannon: I just keep picturing the dinosaur.
Liam: The dinosaur has, like, an album with Oasis. It's called The Barney Session.
Emma: Wow. So under hypnosis, Barney recalled after they returned to their car, after pulling over to view the craft, that he felt compelled to pull off the road and drive into the woods.
Shannon: No, I'm sorry, but no.
Emma: He saw six men in the woods standing and waiting for them. The car stalled, and three of the six came forward, and Barney felt that he was being told to close his eyes. He didn't fear them, but he was very anxious. He and Betty were taken onto the craft mhm and then separated. He was taken to a room by three of the men and was told to lay down on an exam table. He kept his eyes closed for most of the exam and the experience. So his description of the encounter is much less detailed than Betty's. They scraped his skin and examined his ears and mouth. And I wrote they did butt stuff. And I only mean that because the way that it was described was that they put a tube up his butt.
Liam: Now, why would they do that?
Emma: I don't know. But that was what she told them.
Liam: Poor Barney got the worst of it, man. Betty was like, no, but I mean, Betty was just like, oh, it's kind of scary. They put, like, a needle in my belly button. Then they stopped the pain, so it wasn't that bad. And then Barney was like, what? They put a tube in my butt? What are you talking about?
Emma: You did so easy. Yeah, so they did that. And then someone felt his spine and counted the vertebra. Or at least that seemed to be what they were doing.
Shannon: They don't have X ray machines.
Emma: Uh i don't know.
Liam: They could be really advanced in some ways, and then they could just be like, I don't know, figuring out.
Shannon: Did they talk about what their hands look like? Because I'm picturing. No, they didn't spin the fingers, like counting your feet.
Emma: The few times that the beings communicated with him, they didn't move their mouths. He didn't have the word telepathy in his vocabulary and instead called it thought transference, which just sounds, like more fancy to me.
Liam: Yeah, it sounds more fancy than telepathy telepathy. And that's probably because you've heard the word telepathy so many times. I mean, maybe I'm just thinking. But, like, thought transference. That sounds very cool. Give him credit for that.
Emma: Regardless, he believed that the language that they were speaking to him in was English.
Liam: Interesting.
Emma: So after being taken back to their car and watching the ship leave, they got back on the road. And this is where he recalled Betty's speculation that the light that they had just seen was the moon. But the moon had set several hours earlier, which I don't know what that means.
Liam: What is that?
Emma: Okay, I was going to ask you.
Shannon: Guys have you ever heard of the moon?
Emma: Moon setting?
Liam: Usually it goes in kind of a figure eight.
Emma: Yeah.
Shannon: I thought the moon was always there. You see it during the daytime?
Emma: Sometimes, yeah.
Shannon: I mean, obviously the moon is always.
Emma: There, but, I mean, at night, they.
Liam: Take away the moon, they put it.
Emma: Back in the box.
Shannon: But you know what I mean?
Emma: I thought it was visible. I didn't know what that meant. The nightcap guys who were interviewing them also were like, the moon had set hours earlier. And I was like, when does the moon start?
Liam: It does not set.
Shannon: I don't truly, though, if you give any group in an acronym, they automatically sound more professional.
Emma: That's fair. Like nightcap.
Liam: Yeah, but it's called nightcap night. No, I know, but it's what it sounds like. It's like the nightcap. It's like a group of sleepers.
Emma: There might be sleeper agents.
Liam: We don't know there would be sleeper agents, except they don't do any sleeper agenting.
Emma: They just go to sleep.
Shannon: Can I get that job? It just goes, what's the insurance plan?
Emma: Like, you guys have dental? We don't know what the moon setting.
Liam: Yeah. That was weird.
Emma: Multiple times, Barney said that under hypnosis, that the eyes were what scared him about the beings, and that he said I felt like the eyes had pushed into my eyes. That's a quote from one of his hypnosis sessions. He also said that one of the greys looked like Hitler and seemed menacing.
Liam: What?
Emma: And we should note that Barney was a World War II vet. In his brain, this menacing Gray looked like his life.
Liam: Did he have a little mustache?
Emma: I don't think so. I think that he was just like. He's menacing.
Liam: I guess. Yeah. If it was a later time, that's like someone from the Iraq war. Bay. Like, that guy kind of looks like Saddam Hussein, but it's still such an obscure thing to do. I don't know.
Emma: I don't know. But aliens. Hitler. They're all there.
Liam: Hitler. Aliens.
Emma: Hitler. Aliens. Hitler.
Liam: Aliens.
Emma: Betty's sessions were a little different. Betty's account was similar to the five dreams she had had, but they were very specific differences, mostly with her capture and release. The tech on the craft was different, and the physical appearance of the beings were very different from her dream. So they were not wearing these uniforms. They were wearing black instead of blue. They didn't have the caps. They were still short. But I'm not sure if the actual features were any different. But both Betty and Barney's descriptions of them when they were asked what their descriptions were, were um very similar. So both of the Hills sessions produced consistent memories with each other, but both contradicted some of the info in Betty's dreams. Simon, the guys doing this hypnosis suggested Betty should draw the star map that the leader had shown her. Eventually she did, but only of the ones that stood out in her memory. So the map was of twelve prominent stars that were connected by lines and three smaller stars that formed a triangle. The stars were connected by solid lines that were, quote, trade routes and dashed lines that were less traveled routes. So there is a picture of this, and I'm going to see if I can pull it up for you guys right now.
Liam: I'd love to see it.
Emma: That's what she drew. We'll touch the Sony instead. Don't worry.
Liam: Very interesting. Yeah, it's kind of funny, I guess you'll get to that point. But I'm wondering if that star map correlates anything or she was just drawn dots.
Emma: I don't necessarily talk about it in this, but I will say that the research um that I did on the star map specifically was looked into by an astronomer. And then after, because it was like right after it was like in the 70s that she looked at the star map and tried to correlate things, and things were starting to line up, and so it was kind of giving them some credibility. And then in the 90s, she refuted her own hypothesis because she realized that uh her equipment at the time wasn't up to par and that the stars that she was matching up were actually much further in distance to some of the others. And so they didn't necessarily match up based on her math onto the map. And so she refuted it herself. The astronomer. Um interesting, Simon concluded that regardless of the doubts he had of the encounter actually ever happening, he believed that the Hills genuinely felt that they had experienced this. Simon speculated that Barney had just recollected Betty's dreams in his session. Though the experiences were different, they were each individual to each, like themselves. They weren't like a shared experience.
Shannon: Right. But he's saying that they genuinely believe that they experienced this. To me, that there's a distinction between that and like, oh, it's a story that they have agreed to.
Liam: They corroborate.
Shannon: Yeah, they definitely believe according to him.
Emma: They definitely believe that it happened. But they had corroborating stories in their Hypnosis sessions anyway, so it kind of backed each other up. After the sessions, though, the Hills were no longer wrought with anxiety about the experience. It actually really helped them work through it. So regardless of whether or not it's true that it happened, it at least helped their anxiety to go through this hypnotic regression. So here's all the rest. The Hills pretty much went uh back to their regular lives. They were willing to discuss with their friends and family what their experience had been, letting the occasional UFO researcher ask them questions. But they apparently didn't want any publicity. However, on October 25, the Boston Traveler, which is a newspaper in Boston, ran a front page story titled UFO uh Chiller. Did they seize the couple? And it's like they being the alien. He was speculating on that it was written by John H. Lukelle, who had allegedly been given an audio tape of the lecture the Hilton had given at the Quincy Center in late 1963, which they've been asked to do in order to be like aliens are real, which I find interesting that they did that and didn't want any kind of publicity about it. But okay. Yeah. He had also obtained confidential notes from the interviews the Hilton um given the UFO investigators before their Hypnosis session. I don't know how he got those, but he did. The story was picked up and they were soon international news. So this became big within like a couple of days of the story being run in the newspaper. In 1960, uh Six the Hills and Simon, the Hypnotists cooperated on a book with writer John G. Fuller called The Interrupted Journey about their case. It included the star map that he had drawn and the drawing that they had made of the craft. And it gained success very quickly. So it was a big thing in the late 60s.
Liam: Yeah. It sounds kind of goes along with big Hollywood movies about the whole culture. That kind of followed with it, too.
Emma: Yeah. Because it was right around that, because.
Liam: I think it might have been. Now, granted, you still got stuff to say.
Emma: Oh, I have. Funny. Yeah.
Liam: I think that this is definitely an example of right place, right time sort of thing for their story to happen because who knows what it really was. I'm going to always err on the side of like, it's a cool story, but I really don't believe it. We'll get to the theory, entertain uh that stuff. It could have just been anything something happens and then they talk about it a little bit. Culture is also moving in that direction, and it catches onto it. I don't think that they were influenced by I'm sure they were influenced by hearing about crafts. Everyone talks about flying saucers or whatever, but I think that it catches on to that. I think it just again, right place, rights time.
Emma: We'll get to it in theory because there might be some that you agree with more once I found upon it.
Liam: That makes sense.
Emma: So February 25 in 1969, Barney passed away um of a cerebral hemorrhage at 46 years old. So he died fairly young. Betty went on to become a celebrity of the UFO community and um claimed later in life to have seen UFOs a number of times. After her initial abduction, she became like.
Shannon: A big celebrity, like the first lady of UFOs, basically.
Emma: Unfortunately, Betty passed away from lung cancer on October 17, 2004, at age 85. After a pretty long battle with it, the alleged experience kicked off the Air Force Initiative Project Blue Books that investigated UFO sightings across the country, which we all know about. Now. There is a historical marker at the alleged abduction site in Lincoln, New Hampshire. Um it took them a couple of years because they went back to the road that they had been driving on and they did it for a couple of years until they found the spot that they believed that they had been abducted. And so now there's a historical marker there, but it took them, like, years.
Shannon: To figure out where it had been. How do you all the trees look the same?
Liam: You're like, oh, that one's a Oak tree. Okay, that one's an Oak tree. Shoot.
Emma: Okay, let's see uh which Oak tree.
Liam: Oak uh tree.
Emma: Which one?
Liam: That was a little uh wider.
Emma: Here uh are the burn marks.
Liam: Yeah. How did they actually uh figure that out?
Emma: I don't know. I guess after collective memory, they were like, yeah, this is it.
Liam: They're like this stretch um of wood and road. That's what this is.
Emma: Yeah. So Betty and Barney's niece, Kathleen Martin, has been an advocate for their honesty for years. Now she talks about their experience. I think she's written a book or at least a lot of articles. She's very open when it comes to talking about all of this stuff and is a very large advocate that they were actually abducted and that they at least they believe that they were. The University of New Hampshire, which was Betty's alma mater, now holds all the documents of the incident and the dress that Betty was wearing when she was allegedly abducted. So they still have that. And multiple tests have been done on that dress, but nothing has come of those tests. They also have the star map that Betty drew, the actual star map. Not like a copy of it, because there are a lot of I looked up the star map to find it to put for Instagram stuff and to show you guys. And it was like multiple different versions.
Shannon: Of people redrawing it for some reason.
Emma: As well as rendered images to figure out what it would look like in the sky kind of stuff.
Liam: That's the thing about making a star map, though. You could just plot random things and then people would be like, oh, that looks vaguely like a star data.
Emma: Yeah.
Shannon: How much do you want to bet that there's some hipster somewhere that has that tattooed on their body?
Liam: Oh, yeah. No, there definitely is. That's actually kind of a cool tattoo.
Emma: That is a very cool tattoo.
Liam: Well, I wouldn't want the original drawing.
Emma: Because it looks a little goofy. It does look a little goofy.
Liam: It would be really fine.
Emma: The rendered ones look a lot more stylized.
Liam: That's cool.
Shannon: Yeah.
Emma: All right, so let's get into this theories.
Liam: Oh, yes.
Emma: So the first theory is stress psychiatrist imagine being so stressed that you hallucinate being abducted by alien.
Shannon: Hey, we got a couple more weeks.
Emma: So psychiatrists later said that the alleged abduction is probably a joint hallucination brought on by being an interracial couple in the 60s, which I just can't for me, it is more believable uh that they were abducted than that they had a joint hallucination.
Liam: A joint hallucination from just like, racism alone.
Emma: Right?
Liam: I mean, look, there's no reason why someone wouldn't believe that does not induce stress.
Emma: Right.
Liam: Could you imagine racism so bad that it just makes you hallucinate aliens?
Emma: I mean, I've never experienced it, so I have no clue.
Shannon: It's like when women, like, in College, I know that legally they have to ask you, but you can go and be like, I have a terrible migraine. And they're like, okay, but are you pregnant? And you're like, no, but that just feels really lazy.
Emma: You're stressed about being an interracial couple, which honestly probably came with a lot of hell of stress. Yeah, that can't possibly be. They've been a couple for a while. They had dated and gotten married. Obviously, this was a stress and happening since they had started dating.
Liam: Why we would make it particularly boil over then. But not only that, you're thinking about, like, I think that the idea. If you're just exploring the stress aspect of it, what particular thing were they doing if they were on a vacation or something like that?
Shannon: Refused to stop for directions, and they.
Emma: Were really having a really tense, really tense moment, something.
Liam: Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking, like, okay, maybe collective stress or whatever. But again, if you're traveling from Canada to New Hampshire and it's just you're on vacation, I mean, granted, they work for the NAACP and whatever else, community advocates. Okay, well, that makes sense. I was thinking, because if they worked for them, I would understand. Okay, well, then there's a little bit of, like, a daily life aspect of it, so they wouldn't want to ruin that by having, like, a crazy uh alien story. But what were their actual occupations?
Emma: He was a postal worker. She was a social worker.
Liam: Okay.
Emma: And they were really active in the local NAACP charter chapter and their own Unitarian Church. They were um very active in their community. Uh they were very welcomed into their community.
Liam: So there's not like they were stars of attention or anything.
Emma: And Betty herself was not into this. She wasn't denied this completely because she said that their relationship was fairly happy. Like, their entire relationship was very happy and that they had had no obvious problems with their friends and family because of their marriage.
Shannon: There was no real issue that they.
Emma: Had ever drawn into a local of the area where the Hills encounter happened. Jim McDonald believes that the aircraft warning beacon on the top of Cannon Mountain was what they misconstrued as a UFO. From the road that they had been driving on, the beacon appears and disappears the same way the Hills reported the UFO vanishing and appearing before them. The rest of the experience, McDonnell concluded, was due to stress, sleep deprivation, and false recovered memories from Hypnosis. The timing is what McDonald's stresses about the beacon of like, this is when their experience was this is when the beacon was going off, and this is the space of time because it's like.
Shannon: A Lighthouse kind of beacon where it.
Emma: Just goes around in a circle and so it goes dark for a minute and then it goes bright again. It goes dark and it goes bright again. But I don't know. It's an interesting piece of this that I would understand, but I don't think.
Liam: Sleep deprivation is no, it's a really weird jump, in my opinion, because, look, if you can do the physical stuff, like, there was a beacon that tracked with what they saw and was around the same time that they were around. But you got to put Occam's razor into this. Okay. You can prove that, but you really have to make a jump that they both collectively hallucinated something that was vaguely the same thing. Makes sense if she had the dreams and told them about it and maybe they had a stress thing and they lost some time or whatever else. But then you also have to refuse to shave off the fact that they went to the weird hypnotherapy, which I really have doubts about.
Emma: So did the hypnotherapist.
Liam: Yeah. Because then if you're doing the hypnotherapy and whatever and trying to bring up, like, false memory, you also have to believe that that also happened. They also both collectively remembered that stuff. It's weird. I don't know. I feel like it's taking too many mental jumps.
Shannon: Yeah. I feel like no matter how tired you are on your road trip, I.
Liam: Have nothing to make.
Shannon: The worst that I've ever done is when you're driving and you see through the trees, a bright circle and you're like, wow, the moon is huge. It is clear. And then you realize that it's actually a Burger King sign. I can't be the only one.
Liam: You're driving down the highway and then you hallucinate. There's a Cracker Barrel, and then uh there is no Cracker Barrel. But there's always a Cracker Barrel.
Emma: Yeah, the Cracker Barrel is actually Cracker Barrel for you.
Liam: It's the Mecca of the road trip.
Emma: Yeah, it is the perfect road trip. Dot spot. You need to eat at the Cracker bar.
Liam: It's the cracker brush.
Emma: Sean has never been to a Cracker Brow.
Liam: Shaun has never been to a Cracker Barrel.
Emma: Yeah.
Shannon: Sean has missed out on a lot of the quintessential American growing up, like middle class American things.
Emma: Just because I don't think parents are.
Shannon: Like cool and cultured and sufficient and.
Liam: They think about, like, there is English. Yeah. But again, I feel like a Cracker Barrel. It's like required when you get a citizenship.
Emma: I don't know. We're still going to go. At some point after this COVID is over, I'm going to take him to a Cracker Barrel and he's going to enjoy it and it's going to be great.
Shannon: I look um forward to hearing about that experience.
Emma: Yeah, me too.
Shannon: All right, I have an additional thought, but I'm going to see if you cover it in the series.
Emma: All right, hold on. Let's get into what they possibly could have mistaken. Just like the beacon. A skeptic blogger, which just as a title is funny named Brian Dunning, said.
Shannon: That since the name is Brian, Brian.
Emma: Brian said that since the hypnosis sessions occurred over two years after the abduction, the couple had plenty of time to get their story straight. He also says that the timeline of the Air Force radar sightings don't match up with the Hills. And the Air Force had concluded that they were probably weather balloons. It was too weak of a radar return that they were like, well, this obviously isn't something that is moving on its own. It's probably just a weather balloon, which I don't think I've ever seen a weather balloon.
Liam: The weather balloon is like the popular like, it does look similar to like, a UFO, sort of what we would think is the cultural norm of a UFO is like the flying saucer, uh what is also metallic and shiny and flies a weather balloon. But it's such a weird because I get it. It makes sense. Like, for example, Roswell and whatever. Like weather balloon, or at least that's what they want you to think. But regardless, really, you can think of a billion different things. And most of the time the Air Force was either like, yeah, but the weather balloon is the only thing that was applicable. So it makes sense. They just throw that out there.
Emma: Yeah. Basically this blogger was like, yeah, they made this up entirely. They got their story straight and completely made it up.
Liam: They make any money on it, though?
Emma: Uh they wrote the book later, Betty went to all of these conventions and stuff. I don't know if she earned any money.
Liam: Is it something to do? I guess um if you guys ever really want just like a little stint of extra Fame, you guys could just be like, yeah. And after making the podcast about alien abductions, we were abducted. Cut this part out so no one knows.
Emma: My guess is that at some point we're going to get haunted.
Shannon: Oh, no, she have a ghost.
Emma: That's Emma.
Shannon: She likes the ghost stories. I leave you guys alone.
Emma: There's a ghost in this house. He's technically supposed to be a, quote unquote kind ghost or like a good spirit.
Shannon: That is the preferable kind.
Liam: Yeah. As opposed to morally Gray or unkind goes, yeah, well, what does he do? He has knocked on turn on the TV, but switch it to a channel.
Emma: That you like, what's the like? He's like, hey, you're missing your show.
Shannon: I set your DVR for you.
Liam: Wait a minute. I don't have a DVR.
Emma: So in the 1990 article titled Entirely Unpredisposed by Martin um Cotmeyer Sound, so.
Shannon: He knew an editor.
Emma: He thought that Barney's memories were influenced by an episode of a show called The uh Outer Limits, which had broadcast two weeks before the first Hypnosis session. The episode had an extraterrestrial with very large eyes who said, quote, in all the universes. In all the unities beyond the universes, all who have eyes have eyes that speak. End quote. The regression hypnosis session of Barney's had him talking almost exclusively about the eyes that press into his to get him to close them. And there's even a recording of one of the hypnosis sessions where he says, oh, my God, the eyes, the eyes, the eyes. Uh which is terrifying, because, of course, this poor man is, like, screaming this. But it's almost exclusively what he talks about. Betty, when asked about the show and the possible um correlations, insisted that she had never even heard of the show, let alone watched it, which, I mean, in the 1960s, televisions are, like, a popular thing. Um and, yes, you watched it all the time. But I don't know if Betty really wanted to be. I don't know, maybe it was just not on when she sat down. Maybe there are other popular culture similarities to Betty and Barney's accounts from before the incident. Like movies that were very large in popular culture. This is the age of scifi. Yeah. So it makes sense that, like, alien encounters as a plot line was something that they were probably exposed to. But it has a lot to do with the Grays and um the craft itself and the uniforms and all of that.
Liam: Right. Which is what always makes uh you raise your eyebrow. Either there are aliens and they all look the same, and everyone's kind of just figured it out at this point, or everyone's just kind of lazy and they're just like, yeah, I saw an alien, and he was small and Gray, and I had big old eyes, and he stole a jar mayonnaise from my fridge.
Emma: Yes, because they've never had mayonnaise before, which obviously, they would want.
Liam: He took it out, and then he went, oh, man, this stuff is only good on sandwiches and for almost nothing else, and then brought it back. It was a horrifying experience.
Shannon: Hey, what are you talking about? Mense.
Emma: If you do not respect that uh mayonnaise.
Liam: Our favorite tour guide.
Emma: Yes, our favorite. He's actually a very good tour guide.
Liam: He knows a lot.
Shannon: You're not wrong.
Liam: No ghost tours.
Emma: All right. The last theory that I will expand upon before I get to what I think is that they were crazy. They were just crazy. Robert Sheifer from the Skeptical Enquirer, which is an actual magazine, getting me a subscription right now, wrote that as late as 1977, Betty would go to UFO vigils and um was once joined by Ufologist or Ufologist. I've heard it both ways.
Shannon: I feel like an Ufologist would be somebody who studies embarrassing.
Liam: Yeah, embarrassing moments.
Emma: We won't talk about it. John Oswald noticed that Betty's observations of her later encounters with UFOs were a little um sketchy. He uh said, quote, Mrs. Hill was unable to distinguish between a landed UFO and a street light. But I would like to dig a little deeper into this, to say, were they side by side landed UFO and a street light.
Liam: And he was like, all right, point to the one you think is the UFO. And she just pointed the streetlight with such convictions.
Emma: Yes. But I mean, my guess is that he's basically saying that she couldn't distinguish any light from like, oh, everything was a UFO almost. So there's a lot of skepticism in that. The last theory is that it actually happened. Um and that because all of those story pieces were corroborated. They were um telling the truth. They believed it honestly and wholeheartedly it happened. What do we think? This is the moment when we say, what do we think? I need to write down what my theory is.
Shannon: May I call you an additional theory?
Emma: Yes, absolutely.
Shannon: That I think fits with the timeline and also concedes to the fact that they supposedly, according to this Hypno therapist, they fullheartedly believed that this occurred to them. Might I present to you marijuana.
Liam: To build on that? Literally? I was thinking earlier, one of the only things that I can think of as someone who legitimately knew that they weren't telling the truth, but could not really otherwise convince themselves that they hadn't really experienced it. I was reading this one thing about a woman who had taken sleeping pills actively. She had to take some kind of antipsychosis antipsychosis medicine because she had a history of schizophrenia and was having trouble sleeping at night. And with that, I forgot. What is the one that people take to go to sleep?
Speaker UNK: Melatonin.
Liam: Uh not melatonin. Like industrial drug.
Speaker UNK: Ambient. Ambient.
Liam: Ambient, yes. And granted, Ambience, I don't know if they had that in the 60s. They probably had some derivative of it. Probably something better, probably something stronger, more aggressive. But she recalls being like, yeah, I took Ambien for a while and I remember distinctly aliens abducting me and doing experiments, and it was horrifying. And I remember every single detail, but I know it was not real. I know it wasn't real, but I'm convinced of this because she was like, I know that I am crazy. I know that this is not true, but my brain is convinced that this happened because I hallucinated because it might.
Emma: Have been a mixture of, like, sleep paralysis and her. Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia and schizophrenia is you hallucinating basically very vivid images and mostly people and demons and hearing them talk to you.
Liam: And ambient itself is so weird too. It makes you do stuff and it makes you.
Emma: You feel like all drugs make you do stuff.
Liam: All drugs, they're supposed to make you do things that you're not already doing. But like, ambient is particularly tough because it'll really mess with your brain.
Emma: That's a very dangerous, very dangerous drug.
Liam: But the thing that I think is interesting is it could have been they were on. I don't know if there is. I mean, I'm sure this is um the first thing someone asked was like, Are you guys on any medication. Are you taking anything?
Emma: I couldn't find anywhere that anyone asked them that thought of that. It was all like, oh, you guys are stressed out.
Liam: Yeah. Why did they think that was unusual?
Emma: Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.
Liam: 90 you're correct about um there's a big drug culture. And not only that, there's a big advent of prescription drugs coming into the mainstream, but being a little more tested and also a little less tested. There were still like, drugstores in like the third.
Shannon: But if you're both under the influence of a substance, you can be suggestible on your own, but also to each other. Yeah, right.
Emma: And say, oh, my gosh, there is a UFO in this guy.
Liam: And then, right, you can have it corroborated because you're going, that's crazy. And then you pass out and you lose some time on your way home. And maybe you guys instead of like, because there wasn't the trip shorter.
Emma: No, the trip was longer.
Liam: Okay. Makes sense. By 2 hours, they could have stopped the car for a little bit and like, pulled over.
Emma: Also, they had their dog. They had their tiny dachshund with them.
Liam: Right.
Emma: Which I'm like, I want to interview the dog.
Liam: Yeah, I wanted him.
Shannon: He'd be like, how's it going?
Emma: I need the dog to tell us whatever you want.
Liam: He starts speaking perfect English and it's.
Emma: Like without moving his mouth.
Liam: Well, you see, he's the leader. He knew he was the one who led them there. Sleeper agent, Swedish alien dogs.
Emma: Delsi spells out something uh backwards, something in Swedish.
Liam: That's the type of chair.
Emma: That's the chair.
Liam: Regardless, I think they go, we're just jumping one theory, but I think that in all honesty, I think it's drugs. How about it?
Emma: Prescription is there the evidence, however, that.
Liam: I could find is not because again, they probably might have been like, did you do any drugs? And they were like, no.
Emma: Yeah.
Shannon: If he's working for the federal government as mhm a worker, they get in trouble.
Liam: Big trouble.
Emma: Yeah. Maybe they're like, never mind, right?
Liam: It could have been they just didn't do it. Or it could have been again, I think prescription drugs that they just were like, no, that's not something that happened before. They could have taken too much. They could have drunk beforehand.
Emma: They were stopped at a diner before because this happened about 10 miles away from the diner that they had stopped at to eat dinner. And um maybe they had alcohol while they were there. I don't know, New Hampshire blue laws or anything.
Liam: Yeah, um I don't know if this especially at this point, drinks at diners.
Emma: But I mean, maybe they had a bad interest. Maybe there were some shrooms in their salad. I don't know. Their salad.
Shannon: Who gets a salad?
Liam: Who gets a salad at a diner with mushrooms in it?
Emma: That was just the first thing.
Shannon: Both of you are like, wow, what.
Emma: Is your diner order?
Shannon: What time of day am I going?
Emma: That's a good point. 10:00 at night.
Shannon: Like 08:00 at night. You get some quality French fries. They have to be the crunchy uh kind. Not too thin, not like McDonald's, but not steak fries. Steak fries are garbage. And I love them. Wow.
Liam: Bold statement.
Shannon: And I love potatoes. But at that point, just get a baked potato because it's not crispy, unless.
Liam: It'S a crispy wedge potato, which is rare.
Shannon: But it's hard. Yeah, it's hard to get that. And then if this diner is in New Jersey or New York, I'm probably getting a Giro, because um Greek food is very good, because they always sell.
Emma: Them a diner or by Greek family. Yes.
Shannon: And if it's in New Jersey, I'm also going to get a drink because you can get alcohol in a diner in Jersey, because everything is legal in.
Liam: New Jersey except filling up your own gas paradoxically.
Shannon: Jobs.
Liam: Yeah, jobs. It's a good job guarantee. But it is really funny. It's like everything's legal. Uh don't get out of your car.
Shannon: Don't you dare.
Emma: What's your diner order?
Liam: My diner order at 10:00 at night. I'd probably get like, it really depends on the mood because I'm very indecisive if I'm ever in a Denny's or something.
Emma: Have you ever been in a Denny's?
Liam: Yeah, Denny's is great.
Emma: I have never been in never been to a Denny's. No, I have no reason to. And there are perfectly wonderful, actual, legitimate diners.
Liam: Yeah. Do they stay open until then?
Emma: Yes, Phil does.
Liam: Phils, who's that in Narragantic? Okay, I'm sorry. I was thinking, like, around the area here.
Emma: No, there's no diners. This is Virginia. You're not in New England.
Liam: No, there's pancake houses, which is the fancy term for diners that stay open until 05:00 and then.
Emma: No, pancake houses are not diners. Pancake houses are not diners.
Shannon: They are brunch places.
Emma: They are for brunch, exclusive diner food diner.
Liam: A diner to me is a diner to me. Phil, who's a diner, but I feel like a pancake house is also a.
Emma: Diner because Mama Steve is not a diner.
Liam: You take that back.
Emma: I will not. Mamasie's is not a diner.
Liam: Mamas Steve is a diner. It serves American breakfast food along with Southern Nokia. The midday.
Emma: I so do not agree.
Shannon: Myself out.
Emma: It's not the international house of pancake.
Liam: It's an international home of pancake.
Emma: All right, well, regardless of our disagreement on what would be happening, you still haven't answered the question. What is your diner order?
Liam: My diner order 10:00 P.m.. I don't know. I'd probably get, like, French toast.
Emma: At.
Liam: The time because you're like 10:00. You're uh thinking like, man, when was the last time I had breakfast? Regardless, it's been 12 hours ago.
Shannon: For you, it would be like it's.
Emma: 10:00 at night, probably 9 hours ago.
Liam: But maybe I'll do that. Sometimes I get a sandwich. Sometimes you get a burger. Really? I stay unpredictable so they can't poison.
Emma: My wild card stay unpredictable. See, I'm such a habit person because if I were going to like Phil's or I will concede Mama Steve's for now, if I were to go there at 10:00 at night. But they don't stay open. They don't stay open, which does dock.
Liam: Points from their diner.
Emma: Yeah. However, my meal that I would choose would be two pancakes, chocolate chip. I would have a milkshake and then feel real sick afterwards.
Shannon: I was just saying, you are not.
Emma: Finishing all this food. No. And I would have two sides of bacon because they always give you so much less than you actually want. And um home fries. Not hash Browns. Home fries.
Shannon: How do you define home fries are.
Emma: Like the little cubes of yes of potato rather than, like, shredded potatoes. And then I would need uh the nice. I would need somebody to be eating with me because I wouldn't want to eat alone.
Liam: That makes sense. That's a very specific choice of food.
Emma: Um shannon's dying.
Liam: I'm also thinking right now, but you miss uh Leah.
Emma: I did on purpose because I was in the middle of um talking.
Liam: The other thing I'm thinking of right now is the fact that there's always that feeling after you go to a diner or fast food. It's the post McDonald's clarity of I should not have done that. But every single time they wrote you back in, I go and I get a McChicken. I finish eating that MC chicken. I go, oh, my God. I shouldn't have eaten that. Mcgee.
Emma: I haven't eaten fast food in so long.
Liam: It's turned into a ritual.
Emma: The fastest food I've ever eaten is Panera.
Liam: You've eaten Panera very fast.
Shannon: Um the fastest food.
Emma: Uh the fastest food in terms of fast food chains.
Liam: Okay. I thought you were, like, the fastest food ever was Panera. They threw bread at me until I left.
Emma: No. All right, so the theory for you guys is that they were probably on drugs or had been under the influence in some way, in some capacity. Okay, that's a fair statement. I think. I think that I would like to believe that they actually experienced this, but that it wasn't aliens. It was some kind of government conspiracy, a lax files of, like, they were picked up because they were alone on the road, and they were, like, not a routine stop because that wouldn't make any sense. But the roadblock thing that she remembers well, that she dreamt really, she didn't remember it. She dreamt that they had, like, hit that there was a roadblock there, and so they were stopped, and then they had to get on this craft, and they were in uniforms and, yeah, they looked weird, but it was also nighttime, and maybe they did something where they drugged them and then some kind of. I don't know. So there's that. I think that there's some kind of X Filesy thing happening. Um and then they were basically given the opportunity to dig themselves a hole and jump in of like, we were abducted by aliens and everyone thinks that they're crazy.
Liam: That's interesting. I mean, the question is always for me, whenever it's like the government did, this is what is the government gain from it? My question is, okay, if they were involved in some sort of government thing where they were doing research, how much money did Congress secretly give to the project? We're like, okay, so what are you doing with this? And they're like, okay, so we need 14 rubber heads, about 149. 99 each to look like aliens. We need Hitler eyes. That will be 44. 99. Um we need some money to build a uh craft so that these people in New Hampshire think of uh aliens.
Emma: Uh it's a fair point to say, like, what does the government get from this? And I don't think in truth, I don't have an answer for that because the government did it. Yes.
Liam: My question is always like, whenever they have the whole thing is like the government experiments on people. We have examples of it, like the Tuskegee experiments or all the other times.
Emma: Yeah. No one's good at keeping secret.
Liam: Yeah.
Emma: It's really there's always someone to leak something.
Liam: But then not only that, if they were doing human scrapes and putting stuff or whatever, you can do that research at any Med school, College student, $20.
Emma: And they're like, scrape my arm, anything. Yeah. So I don't know. That's just my thought. And that's the Barney and Betty Hill abduction story.
Liam: It's a very fascinating story.
Emma: And it's the very first real recorded.
Liam: Modern one of people getting abducted, people.
Emma: Being abducted and returned because there's some that they speculate they've been abducted and then disappeared.
Liam: My question is honestly, it's just because if you're talking about media influence, drug influence, whatever, the thing I want to know is what stuff before this and shows movies like whatever actually had people abducted and brought back. And if there were, did they watch them? If there was, did they hear about it? Yeah.
Emma: I would like to know how much of popular quotes they actually indulge.
Liam: Yeah. There is no original idea, but there are ideas that are a little original. And who knows, they could have just been like, wouldn't it be interesting if people were abducted and then brought back? But like, I don't know.
Emma: I don't know. It could have been every episode of X Files. Yeah, every single episode.
Shannon: And that's why you should always watch something happy before you go to sleep. If you've been watching something weird because your brain is going to take those ideas and go.
Liam: For a year.
Emma: Well, if you want to see any of the pictures of Barney and Betty, there's a few of them idea. You want to get your next tattoo idea from the Star Map. If uh you want to see their adorable little dog, DELSEY, he's very cute. They will be on the Instagram at this podcast. Doesn't exist. If you have an abduction story. Liam, if you have an abduction story.
Liam: Um if you have been abducted like I have, call them or message them.
Emma: If you have any abduction stories or anything related to aliens or any theories that you would like to share with us, maybe you don't think it's dressed. Maybe you think the government actually did it and you have a reason why you believe that.
Shannon: Or if you'd like to share your diner order with us.
Emma: Seriously, though, I would like to know.
Shannon: Please weigh in. You can do that by emailing us at this podcast doesn't exist@gmail.com.
Emma: Please. We don't have anyone email.
Shannon: Nobody loves us.
Emma: Just email us to say Hi.
Shannon: If you feel like it come validate us, please.
Emma: Liam is not available on social media.
Liam: Uh i mean, I am, but I'm hidden.
Emma: Yeah, you're not around.
Shannon: That's cool.
Emma: But if you'd um like to listen to him again, you can just play.
Shannon: This over or let us know and maybe we can bring him back.
Emma: Yeah, because you're around.
Liam: I'm around. I mean, I do a lot, but I don't really do much.
Emma: Wow.
Liam: What?
Shannon: Put that on your tombstone?
Emma: I do a lot, but I don't do much.
Shannon: Wow.
Emma: All right. Well, it's been real, you guys. Thanks for coming on.
Liam: All right. Yeah, it was a pretty cool experience. I'd say.
Emma: Is it?
Liam: It's very new.
Emma: Are we cool?
Liam: Yeah.
Shannon: Well, it's on the record now.
Liam: It's on the record. You actually have that audio now?
Emma: Yay. I'm the cool sister.
Liam: You're the only sister.
Shannon: All right, that's enough. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Please rate review subscribe share with a friend tell your mom, tell your dad. Tell them our moms and dads they don't know what's happening.
Emma: Tell your enemies, tell our enemies.
Shannon: Just let everyone know and please share any alien Ikea stories with us.
Emma: Yeah.
Liam: Have you ever been lost in an Ikea? And have you ever lost time? It was probably alien.
Emma: It was alien. It was probably alien. And uh remember, this podcast doesn't exist. Hi. Hello.
Liam: Hello.
Emma: Who is that? That's the wrong. No. Starting over.
Liam: Okay.
Shannon: Hi. Hello.
Liam: Hello?
Emma: No.
Liam: Okay.
Emma: You don't talk yet. I will point.

Sources:
The Mother Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney_and_Betty_Hill#cite_note-27
The Exhibition of Betty and Barney Hill at the University of New Hampshire: https://www.newswise.com/articles/exhibition-of-betty-and-barney-hill-collection-opens-at-unh-couple-claimed-to-be-abducted-by-aliens
The collection: https://www.library.unh.edu/find/archives/collections/betty-and-barney-hill-papers-1961-2006#series-1
Boston Globe “Why Alien Abductions are Down”: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/06/11/why-alien-abductions-are-down-dramatically/qQ3zdBIc2tLAf3LVms8GLP/story.html
The Death of Betty Hill, covered by the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/us/betty-hill-85-figure-in-alien-abduction-case-dies.html
Betty and Barney’s story by the Concord Monitor: https://www.concordmonitor.com/In-Lincoln-a-UFO-story-that-is-out-of-this-world-15987667
The Truth about the Star Map: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmDxXcRCkN4&ab_channel=DiscoveryUK
An overview of the incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixPZD8Pu_68&ab_channel=BuzzFeedUnsolvedNetwork T
he Basement Office overview of the incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO5OhbIdXWU&ab_channel=NewYorkPost