The University of New Hampshire Dimond Library in Durham, NH. All photos provided by the author.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, I considered my time at “the archive”—that place where scholars sift through records and publications—to have come to a pause.1 My last major research trip had been for my dissertation and was in 2016. In fall 2019, I began to plan my return to the archive the following summer, hoping to make it to Cape Town, South Africa, to begin work on what would be my dissertation spinoff, a monograph on the history of the Flat Earth movement. Needless to say, that trip never happened, even before the University of Cape Town’s special collections were ravaged by a 2021 fire.2
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, however, I had still managed brief sojourns to local archives. While living in Queens, I made a half-day trip to the New-York Historical Society to look through their Flat Earth-related documents (a bust). Visiting my parents in my hometown, I spent a more productive morning at the Historical Society of Glastonbury looking through their collection related to the Glawackus, a local cryptid from the 1930s.3 Be on the lookout for an upcoming episode about my Glawackus hunt on The Impossible Archive, a podcast I co-host with Contingent editor Bill Black.4
Moving to Fall River, Massachusetts at the start of 2022, I had a chance for some additional research day trips. Forty-five minutes south, I spent a morning at the Newport Tower Museum listening to the owner’s unique take on the provenance of the eponymous colonial-era windmill across the street. Twenty minutes away, I spent a full day at Brown University’s John Hay Library going through their H. P. Lovecraft papers for the final research of a book on Lovecraft’s links to astronomy I co-authored with Horace A. Smith (due out from Hippocampus Press in summer 2023).
All of those visits were a day or less at the site in question, requiring under an hour of transit to get there. But those short trip experiences would finally end on July 6 and 7, 2022, when I conducted research at an archive several hours away, over multiple days. On those two days, I visited the Milne Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) Dimond Library, spending the night in between at my aunt and uncle’s in New Hampshire. The subject of my research: the Betty and Barney Hill Papers.
Barney’s lifetime membership in the NAACP. From the Betty and Barney Hill Papers, 1961-2006, MC 197, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH, USA.
For the uninitiated, Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple who lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and were prominent figures in their state’s civil rights movement during the 1960s. Barney was chairman of the Portsmouth NAACP Political Action Committee, and Betty was a social worker for the state. Their papers included numerous correspondences with New Hampshire Governor John W. King, senator Thomas J. McIntyre, and U.S. representative Louis C. Wyman; their invitation to Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 presidential inauguration, in recognition of their work on his New Hampshire re-election campaign, was also in their papers.
A 1964 police report Barney filed on a group of Confederate flag-waving racists he encountered. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
They also, in 1961, became the first of what would become termed alien abductees, claiming to have been kidnapped by aliens in the middle of the night in rural New Hampshire during a drive back from Montreal, an event which from its popularization in a 1965 Boston newspaper article, immediately overshadowed their civil rights work. Barney died in 1969 and was more reserved about his newfound alien abductee popularity, but Betty lived until 2004, and remained a fixture in the UFO community until the end. It was due to their alleged UFO encounter that I made the drive up to Durham, New Hampshire, to look through their materials as research for an article on the role of New England folklore in the wider UFO mythology.5
An undated photograph of Barney Hill next to a model of a sailing ship and the solar system. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
On my first day, a Wednesday morning, I entered the library, while a tour guide explained to a group of incoming freshmen how the library worked—a reminder I was glad to have for my own return. The special collections were in the basement, two flights of stairs down from the entrance. I had forgotten how cold archives could be, despite it being 80 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and made the mistake of wearing shorts; when I returned the next day, I wore long pants and took a light coat with me. Both days, I was the only researcher there, alone with the reference librarian; the one phone call came at the end of the first day, and unsurprisingly was also an inquiry into accessing the Hill collection, apparently for an upcoming UFO television documentary.
The cover to Betty Hill’s 1995 self-published book A Common Sense Approach to UFOs, featuring her and “Junior,” a ceramic bust of one of the aliens she encountered in 1961. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
The Hills’ encounter came fourteen years after the creation of the term “flying saucer” by the pilot Kenneth Arnold, whose report of nine unidentified flying objects near Mount Rainier inaugurated the modern era of UFO sightings. The objects seen by Arnold resembled flying wings, but because he described their flight pattern as being like saucers skipping across water, the media misreported the objects as “flying saucers.” Due to this error, most subsequent reports of alien visitors had them flying circular vehicles—a cautionary tale about the reinforcing nature of media reports in public perception of history. The vehicle the Hills reported stuck out from most contemporary sightings because of the details, including stubby wings on each side and an observation deck in the middle. I was not expecting to find the actual original drawing of the saucer by Barney in the archives, and took the time to savor the physical connection to the paper of something that was the basis for many replica illustrations I had seen in UFO books as a kid.
Barney’s 1961 drawing of the flying saucer he and Betty saw. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
Prior to the Hills’ story, the most common depiction of alien visitors was of tall, blonde human men who typically encountered New Agers walking in the California desert. These “Nordics” would share the secret to spiritual enlightenment before departing back to their bases on Venus, the far side of the Moon, or inside the Hollow Earth.6 Occasionally, there would be reports of more gremlin-like aliens, such as those reported by a Kentucky family in the infamous 1955 “Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter.” The Hills, however, reported aliens who were of slightly smaller stature, with greenish-gray skin, wraparound eyes, and small mouths. These were the genesis of what would become the now-hegemonic Grey aliens, made famous by the cover of Whitley Streiber’s 1987 book Communion. The Hills’ alien captors, however, were not quite at the unearthly level of Streiber’s “Visitors.” For example, the Hills’ aliens wore clothing—specifically leather jackets, caps, and scarves—and spoke English, albeit with an unspecified “foreign accent.” Nevertheless, the Hills’ aliens were still the genesis for what has become the standard view of what an alien resembles.
In 1967, the Hills hired artist David Baker to paint depictions of the aliens based on their specific descriptions. The paintings became the standard for how aliens became interpreted in the public. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
As part of her abduction, the alien “Leader” revealed to Betty a star map showing the alien homeworld and trade routes, including the one leading to Earth. The aliens, however, declined to identify which point on the map was our solar system. In 1964, under hypnosis carried out by the Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, Betty recreated the star map to the best of her abilities. In the late 1960s, this caught the attention of amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish, who attempted to build a 3-D model of the star map that fit in with what was then the existing knowledge of distances and positions of nearby stars. In 1974, the then-new journal Astronomy, published her research in an article which almost ruined the nascent publication. In her map, Fish identified the aliens’ home system as Zeta Reticuli, which has stuck as the home of the Greys in ufology. As evidence of how quickly the idea disseminated, in the 1979 film Alien, the Zeta Reticuli system is where the titular xenomorph is discovered by the Nostromo crew (returning to Earth on their own interstellar trade route). Two years earlier, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind had already drawn inspiration from the Hills’ description for its own alien abductors.
Another David Baker depiction of the aliens, wearing clothing and hats, that the Hills claimed to see. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
In the first decade following the public awareness of the Hills’ interrupted journey, alien abduction accounts remained rare, and when they happened, had different events than the model of the Hills.7 In 1975, the Hills’ experience was made into a TV movie, The UFO Incident, with Betty and Barney played, respectively, by Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones.8 Within weeks, The UFO Incident inspired a new wave of abduction reports similar to those of the Hills. The first, less than three weeks after The UFO Incident, was the abduction of Travis Walton, which in 1993 became the basis of its own movie, Fire in the Sky. By the 1980s, three leading figures in ufology would emerge: the artist Budd Hopkins, the historian David Jacobs, and the psychiatrist John Mack. Betty was vehemently unhappy with their methodology in investigating abduction reports, believing their use of hypnosis—none of them were professional hypnotists, unlike Dr. Simon who had conducted her and Barney’s regressions—was unprofessional and led to corrupted reports. To Betty, their amateur efforts led to alien abduction reports in the 1980s becoming more traumatic to abductees in their formulation, enmeshed in the conspiratorialist related to the anti-government rhetoric of the Reagan Revolution. While at odds with the new leading figures in the UFO community, Betty nonetheless remained close to and popular with many of the regular people interested in UFOs, speaking at UFO events and corresponding with fans across the world until her 2004 death.
Betty Hill’s initial 1964 hypnotic recreation of the alien star map. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
After my first day at UNH, I made my way to my aunt and uncle’s house in southern New Hampshire, stopping for dinner in Epping—a town which played a minor role in the “Incident at Exter,” the other major New Hampshire UFO sighting from the 1960s (and popularized in the 1966 book Incident at Exeter by journalist John G. Fuller, who the same year would also publish The Interrupted Journey, which popularized the Hills’ story). Spending the evening with my aunt and uncle gave me an opportunity to indulge in a discovery I had made in the library that first day—a rare chance to immediately act upon an archival finding in a way I had not been able to do before.
Marjorie Fish’s 1969 attempts to fit Betty’s star map into existing astronomical data. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
During my first day of research, I came across several documents demonstrating that in addition to UFOs, Betty was interested in the New England Antiquities Research Association, an organization which promotes the idea that the northeastern U.S. is littered with relics of pre-Columbian European colonization (such as Newport Tower). In particular, Betty was interested in the so-called “America’s Stonehenge,” a colonial-era cider press rebranded as a mysterious object of unknown provenance in the 1930s. As it turns out, America’s Stonehenge is only a few miles from my aunt and uncle, so I decided to drop by before returning to UNH for my second day in the archives.
The sign introducing me, and the schoolkids, to the fictional history of America’s Stonehenge.
When I arrived, a bus of elementary school kids were there, which did not bode well for their history education, although there is also solace in that they most likely would only absorb the day as a fun field trip. Their visit, as well as mine, had an interesting historical parallel of its own. In 2019, a QAnon follower defaced the site because an episode of the History Channel show America Unearthed convinced him it was a sacrificial center for Freemasons. Ironically, my visit to America’s Stonehenge came the day after a domestic terrorist bombed the Georgia Guidestones, also referred to in the press as America’s Stonehenge, after a QAnon-following Georgia politician had denounced them as “Satanic” (in line with wider conspiracy theorist thought, itself likely inspired by another episode of America Unearthed).
Was America’s Stonehenge built by the same visitors who built the Newport Tower? Is such a thing even possible? Note the insignia of the New England Antiquities Research Association at the bottom center of the poster.
The defacing of America’s Stonehenge and the destruction of the Georgia Guidestones served as a reminder that the sort of pseudohistory promoted by the place I was visiting, or the pseudoscience promoted by Betty Hill and her fellow ufologists, has very real-world implications, particularly when belief in those conspiracy theories becomes a powerful electoral bloc for radical reactionary politicians. I wondered what Betty would make of those developments. After all, during my rifling through her papers, I found multiple letters across the decades from concerned Christians who believed her alien captors had actually been the fallen angels of Satan. The Satanic Panic era and the 1980s abduction beliefs of Budd Hopkins and Whitley Streiber have more than a few similarities. But given her views on the abduction promoters of the 1980s, I have to believe that Betty, and especially Barney, would not be at risk of joining the ranks of QAnon.
A 1989 postcard to Betty from Valerii Sanarov, an anthropologist in the Soviet Union interested in alien abduction reports. (Betty and Barney Hill Papers)
When Thursday afternoon arrived and the archive closed, I packed up, ready for the drive home. I had gathered much research for my paper, but I had also indulged myself in looking through as much as I could about the inner lives of these two people, whose names I had known as a kid and whose story had at times kept me up at night. I think I had a slightly better sense of them as people, and I certainly had a better sense of how they, especially Betty, viewed the mythology they helped shape.
Leaving the campus, on a backroad in New Hampshire, I realized a car in front of me had a typical alien-head sticker looking backwards at me from its rear window.
- But why do historians even have to go to archives anyway? Isn’t everything digitized?
- Nora McGreevy, “Why the Cape Town Fire Is a Devastating Loss for South African Cultural Heritage,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 20, 2021, accessed July 13, 2022.
- A cryptid is an animal or creature that may exist somewhere in the wild but is not believed to exist by mainstream science. Examples include Bigfoot, El Chupacabra, and the Loch Ness Monster. Read more from the author on this subject in “Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa,” one of the first pieces published in Contingent.
- In 1939, the tracks, vocalizations, and animal victims of what was reportedly a large, black feline of unknown species was reported in Glastonbury, Connecticut, then a small agricultural town. The Glawackus—“Glastonbury wackyus”—briefly became a local, and even national, sensation, with Hartford companies selling Glawackus insurance and providing tongue-in-cheek “interviews” with the beast. Although some of the later tracks were hoaxes, the origin of the sightings was never conclusively proven.
- The broad similarities include a history of celestial visions in the region related to Puritan theology; Indian captivity narratives paralleling later abduction descriptions; African American folklore about medical experimentation; and a history of short-statured and bulbous-headed creatures in both Native and settler legends.
- In the seventeenth century, notions about an inhabitable inner region of the Earth accessible via openings at the poles were first formulated by the astronomer Edmond Halley. In the post-World War II era, this notion was combined with conspiracy claims about Nazi expeditions to Antarctica and super-science aircraft, making the line between Nordic aliens in flying saucers and Nazi Aryans in advanced airship blurred—particularly because many of the advocates of Nordic alien encounters had been fascist sympathizers in the 1930s.
- The term “interrupted journey” is a reference to a 1966 book, by John G. Fuller, who popularized the Hills’ 1961 abduction story.
- One wonders whether Spielberg watched The UFO Incident as part of his research for Close Encounters, and then recommended Jones to his friend George Lucas, then developing his own movie involving aliens.
