Insane Alien Abduction Stories That Will Terrify You

Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript, with sensitive content removed or modified for appropriateness:

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Even in a deep state of hypnosis, Barney Hill was clearly overwhelmed with fear, recalling that dark and strange night in the White Mountains that occurred almost a year prior. The hypnotist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, was taking careful notes. The words Barney spoke shook him deeply. “Oh, those eyes. They’re in my mind… I was told to close my eyes because I saw two eyes coming close to mine, and I felt like the eyes had pushed into my eyes… All I see are these eyes… I’m not even afraid that they’re not connected to a body. They’re just there. They’re just up close to me, pressing against my eyes…” Immersed in these traumatic memories, Barney began to scream in distress. The eyes! The eyes! Dr. Simon lunged forward, trying desperately to comfort Barney as the confusion and horror washed over him anew. What had Barney experienced? What event would make him and his wife, Betty, a part of UFO history forever?

This is the story of what many consider to be the very first reported case of alleged alien abduction. Bill Ross, a Professor Emeritus at UNH, described the couple at the center of this story as “The Adam and Eve of Alien Abduction.” And it all began on a dark, lonely mountain road… New Hampshire, September 19, 1961. A little after 10:00 PM. It was a cold night in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where Betty and Barney Hill were driving down Route 3 in their ‘57 Chevy, accompanied by their dachshund, Delsey. Barney was in the driver’s seat, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music from the car’s stereo. Betty was reflecting on the memories of their vacation – Montreal and Niagara Falls. The trip of a lifetime – or at least, it was meant to be.

In truth, the vacation that was meant to be a late honeymoon had turned out to be a disaster. Betty had struggled with the language barrier in the largely Francophone area of Canada, and Barney had felt a great sense of anxious foreboding – as though something terrible was about to happen. In a sense, he was right. Their challenging vacation was soon to be overshadowed by a life-changing phenomenon waiting in the twinkling stars above.

While they may have shared their first names with characters from The Flintstones, by all accounts, Betty and Barney were a perfectly normal couple. Betty was a social worker attending the University of New Hampshire, and Barney was a veteran and alumnus of Temple University who worked for the United States Postal Service. They were also active in their local Unitarian Church. The couple was a rare interracial pairing – Betty was white, and Barney was black, which was uncommon in rural New Hampshire in the early sixties.

They were also active in the Civil Rights movement, both being members of the local chapter of the NAACP. Barney even sat on the board of the local United States Commission on Civil Rights. These were educated, well-respected pillars of their local community. In short, credible witnesses – hardly your stereotypical UFO enthusiasts, but that didn’t stop them from having an encounter straight out of an episode of The X-Files.

It was just south of Lancaster that Betty noticed a strange light in the sky; at first, she thought it must have been a shooting star, but this was the only shooting star she’d ever seen that was moving upwards. How strange. It was moving from below the moon to the west of it. Betty was no professional astronomer, but she knew this wasn’t right and immediately alerted Barney to its presence. Barney had been in the US Army prior to joining the postal service – he still kept a habit of carrying his old service pistol around with him on long trips – so he’d seen his fair share of aerial activity, but he’d never seen anything like this. The light looked to be getting bigger and brighter – Wait, is it getting closer to the car!?

The couple parked their car in a picnic area near Twin Mountains to give Delsey some exercise in the middle of the long car ride. While Betty walked the dog, Barney decided to satisfy his curiosity, reaching into the back of his car to find his favorite pair of binoculars. He grabbed them by the leather strap, lifted them to his eyes, and decided to take a closer look at the strange twinkling object in the sky. It definitely wasn’t a star, but it wasn’t like any plane he’d seen before, either. It was a disk-shaped object covered in a row of multi-colored lights. Barney immediately called over Betty, who took a look through the binoculars, too. She saw the same unfamiliar glowing object as Barney, so either they weren’t seeing things, or they were both mistaken. Either way, it seemed like a cause for concern.

Betty remembered an account her sister had given of having seen a flying saucer a few years earlier. At the time, Betty had just humored her – she didn’t believe in extraterrestrial beings. But now, she was beginning to entertain the idea. Barney took back the binoculars and looked again. His rational mind was working overtime to create some kind of logical explanation for this. He had a genius-level IQ of 140, so he certainly wasn’t the kind of man to immediately jump to fantastical conclusions. Perhaps it was a matter of perspective – maybe it was a passenger jet heading from Vermont to Montreal, and they were just getting a side-on view of it. Seemed reasonable enough. Just a trick of the angle. Until he saw the object begin to lower – and start moving towards them!

He swallowed hard and tried to remain calm, saying, “Betty, get Delsey back in the car. It’s getting late. I think we should leave.” Betty had no complaints. The Hills and their dog piled back into the Chevy and took off from the picnic area across Route 3 via Franconia Notch, driving slowly to keep an eye on the strange object without attracting any undue attention from it. Betty watched the object follow them, passing across the top of a signal tower on Cannon Mountain and emerging near a series of cliff faces known as the Old Man of the Mountain due to their distinctive, face-like shapes. This gave Betty enough perspective to start estimating the size of the craft. She guessed it was maybe 60 feet across, and it seemed to be rotating, as though this motion powered its ability to fly.

Delsey was starting to get anxious in the car, but the Hills found it impossible to get their minds off the craft as it got closer and closer, silently following their Chevy. No plane could get that close. No helicopter could be that quiet. The curiosity was too great now – Barney decided to stop the car and get a closer look, having no idea that this seemingly innocent decision would lead to a terrifying night. He slammed on the brakes in the middle of the quiet highway a mile south of Indian Head and stepped out, sliding his pistol out of his pocket and aiming his binoculars at the rapidly descending object. What he saw struck him with fear: The craft had illuminated windows, and behind them, strange, humanoid beings stood and watched him. They were wearing glossy black uniforms and military-style caps. His jaw dropped. This was impossible!

While Betty was desperately asking her husband what he was seeing, the beings – which were definitely not human – scattered inside the craft to a large control console. Only one, possibly the leader, remained at the window, holding Barney’s gaze. He felt strange sensations coursing through his body as a voice spoke directly into his mind. “Stay where you are and keep looking,” it said. Barney could barely move. He began to panic, shouting, “We need to get out of here. They’re going to capture us!” to his wife as the craft descended, releasing fin-like protrusions from its sides. The two were able to break free of the strange control that the beings were exerting over them and scrambled back to the car. They drove as fast as they could in the direction of their hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And they would arrive there – just not in the way that they expected.

The last thing either of them remembered after that was hearing strange beeping noises, like the kind that happened when you pressed buttons on a microwave, coming from the trunk of their car. Their bodies began to tingle, and what seemed like a huge, fiery orb blocked their route. Within the space of a blink, it was over, and they regained lucidity 35 miles south of Franconia Notch. They had somehow moved in the wrong direction and lost track of two hours of time in the process. Their dog, Delsey, was hiding under one of the seats. The couple had a thousand questions, but they all fit neatly under one: What had happened?

Their first priority was getting out of the mountains and returning home, which they were finally able to do by dawn, feeling tired, confused, and disoriented. But sadly for the Hills, their unusual experience wasn’t over – it was only just beginning, as in the hours and days following the incident, they began to notice increasingly strange things, clues that may have held the answers to the mysterious events that occurred the night before. Both of their watches were broken and never worked again after that night, as though some force had interfered with the mechanisms. The strap of Barney’s binoculars was also now broken, as though somebody had yanked them off his body during a struggle. Betty’s dress was also stained and torn, further suggesting that the couple had indeed been involved in some kind of altercation. There were also strange scuffs on Barney’s shoes and shiny circles on the back of the car that hadn’t been there before.

More peculiar still, when the couple held a compass next to the shiny circles, it went haywire, indicating that they had somehow been magnetized – though for reasons neither member of the couple could really understand. But it wasn’t just the objects – there were changes to the bodies and minds of Betty and Barney Hill. Betty, for reasons unknown to her, felt the need to pack the luggage they’d brought back at the back of the house rather than inside it – perhaps as a subconscious acknowledgment of the fear that their possessions had somehow been contaminated by the experience. This was doubly true of her ruined dress, which she later noticed was covered in a strange powder that she was unable to identify.

The effects on Barney would be even more pronounced. He experienced severe soreness of the back and neck and the strangest sense that something had been taken from him. He compulsively checked himself in the bathroom but thankfully found that there was nothing amiss. The couple took long showers, just in case they were contaminated, and when they tried to recall the chronology of the events that took place after they tried to escape from the beings on the craft, their memories failed them. It was like they’d been erased from the minds of Betty and Barney Hill. Someone – or something – didn’t want them to know what had happened that night.

In this time of uncertainty, Barney wanted to return to something familiar: the military. Their first port of call was to report what they’d seen to the Air Force, speaking to an officer at the local Portsmouth Air Force base. However, they omitted certain details from their report, worrying that they’d be thought of as insane. While the officer they spoke to told them that they had most likely just seen Jupiter and mistook it for a craft, he still reported their story to the infamous Project Blue Book – which any ardent UFO fans will be familiar with. Project Blue Book was the long-running Pentagon UFO research project, running from 1947 through 1969 and cataloging numerous sightings in that time. However, the project didn’t look kindly on the Hill incident, filing it under “Insufficient Data.”

Next came the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena, or NICAP. The couple spoke for six hours to Boston-based astronomer Walter N. Webb, who was also a member of NICAP. While the couple still couldn’t recall what happened during the period of lost time, they were able to give a comprehensive account of everything else. Webb would later respond, “They were telling the truth, and the incident probably occurred exactly as reported except for some minor uncertainties and technicalities that must be tolerated in any such observations where human judgment is involved.” But this wasn’t the end – in fact, the strangest parts of the story were yet to reveal themselves.

Around ten days after the encounter, when Barney was eager to put the whole incident behind them and forget it happened, Betty began having strange and vivid dreams – dreams that she believed may have been related to their encounter on that fateful September night. These dreams occurred for five straight days, seemingly building in detail and intensity each time, more like memories than products of the imagination. Betty felt compelled to write down the dreams, and certain interesting details started to accumulate. One dream seemed to be almost a continuation of the time that they lost the night of the abduction: Betty was stopped with her husband at a roadblock in their Chevy when strange figures surrounded their car. At this point in the dream, she lost consciousness. When she awoke, two small beings were forcing her to walk through a forest, and when she turned, she saw Barney walking through the forest, trancelike, behind her.

This was the first time, post-incident, that either of them were able to recall what their captors looked like: They ranged from five feet to around five feet four inches tall, with greyish skin, dark eyes, and prominent features. They wore similar uniforms that Barney could recall seeing when he first stared at the craft through his binoculars. In the dream, after being marched through the forest, the beings took Betty and Barney back to their car. The leader of the beings told them to watch the craft take off, which they did, at which point the couple started driving home as though nothing strange had happened at all.

Could this have been a fragment of what happened that night? And if it was, what happened before they were marched back to their car? Another dream held potential answers: Betty recalled being led into the metallic craft, along with Barney, where they underwent tests from the beings – directed by two main figures, which she identified as “The Leader” and “The Examiner.” While the Leader directed them all, the Examiner bound Betty to a table and injected her with an unknown substance. This caused her a moment of pain before quickly dissipating after some more encouragement from the Leader.

Many people refer to the Betty and Barney Hill abduction as “The First Alien Abduction” because it defined many of the recurring traits we would see manifest in later accounts of alien abductions and their aftermaths. One of these is the common concept of “Missing Time,” experienced by the Hills when they suddenly regained awareness far from their intended locations, having lost track of two hours. In more fanciful cases, such as the Hills, this missing time is often seen as the result of alien memory manipulation technology – and in more mundane cases, memory loss is theorized to be a result of traumatic repression.

And one thing can be said for certain: For Barney and Betty, this incident was definitely traumatic. Betty’s nightmares were often extremely distressing, and Barney, while he showed fewer outward signs of distress, was experiencing ever-worsening anxiety over the incident. Soon enough, they turned to psychiatrist and neurologist Dr. Benjamin Simon for help – a man who also happened to be a professional therapeutic hypnotist. The deal was struck: Over a series of sessions, Dr. Simon would help them excavate the memories of what happened that night.

But nobody was ready for just how strange and disturbing some of these sessions would be. Betty and Barney were given their sessions separately to ensure they couldn’t influence one another. Certain details seemed oddly consistent across both of their accounts: The two of them were stopped in the road for some kind of blockade when the strange beings surrounded them and took them out of the car – at which point they were both led up a metal ramp into the spacecraft that had been following them. Once on the craft, the two were separated and taken into different examination rooms, with curved walls and metal tables in the center. They were each asked to climb onto the tables, at which point, a series of tests began, involving taking samples of their skin, clippings of their fingernails, and taking a large number of samples with needles.

After Betty’s examination was complete, the beings started asking her questions about her husband. They seemed particularly fascinated by the fact that Barney wore dentures, leading Betty to explain the concept to the beings. While Barney was undergoing significantly more traumatic tests, Betty continued to converse with The Leader. She asked him where the craft had flown from, and the Leader joked, “If you don’t know where you are, there wouldn’t be any point in telling you where I am.” Despite this, the Leader did show Betty a star map, which she was able to recreate under Dr. Simon’s hypnosis. The map would be documented in the 1966 book, The Interrupted Journey, along with the effects that the hypnosis had on Barney. While Betty seemed to have had a cordial relationship with the Leader, Barney’s hypnosis sessions often devolved into incoherent yelling, crying, and distress, all of which Dr. Simon recorded in their extensive sessions.

Dr. Simon, for the record, never said that he believed the couple was lying. Even if he doubted the actual facts of the matter, he never doubted that the Hills truly believed what they were telling him, describing it as a singular psychological experience. While the story of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction circulated through the media, especially among local communities, the Hills didn’t actively seek out publicity. They were forthcoming with information when asked, but neither seemed particularly motivated by the fame their case had given them.

In 1968, two years after The Interrupted Journey was published, elementary school teacher and hobbyist astronomer Marjorie Fish revisited the star map that Betty drew under hypnosis. Having applied the map to various models she created, assuming one of the data points was Earth’s sun, she determined that the aliens came from the Zeta Reticuli star system. This is the reason why the Betty and Barney Hill Abduction case is also sometimes known as the Zeta Reticuli Incident. However, Fish’s research on this was highly contentious, drawing support from some, while drawing heavy criticism from others. Perhaps the most famous of these critics was celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan, who even took the time to debunk the Zeta Reticuli Theory in his iconic TV show, Cosmos.

When it came to the Betty and Barney Hill case, it seemed difficult to find a true consensus on anything. Tragically, Barney would pass away young – from a stroke at age 46. It’s not impossible that the stress and anxiety that defined his years after the incident, which caused Barney to develop health issues, may have also raised his blood pressure and increased his chances of suffering a stroke. This left Betty to share their story with more of the public alone, though things were never quite the same for Betty after Barney passed away.

In her later years, Betty seemed to experience cognitive decline. Prominent UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer illustrated this in the following anecdotes. “I was present at the National UFO