Abductee Betty Hill’s adventures in Hollywood
Do Grey aliens really come from Zeta Reticula? Betty Hill might hold the answer.6/30/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
I just returned from the premiere of ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE at Universal City. No saucers or aliens, but there was plenty of mind control of the most deliciously satiric kind. Fearless Leader, played by Robert de Niro, takes over all television stations of the world. His company, RBTV, short for REALLY BAD TELEVISION, is so bad it stupefies everyone that watches. Actually, it Zombifies them.
Entranced, they are so pliable they can easily be commanded to vote for Fearless Leader for president. The CIA could have learned a thing or two for its MK-ULTRA mind control program from Boris and Natasha. Delightful, with fabulous special effects, the film is a treat, a true cousin to WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT - and bull-brained Bullwinkle steals the show. Now if they had only worked in some flying saucers . . .
In a recent article, I confided in AlienZoo fans about how my career as a producer started with a stint on a syndicated TV show called LIE DETECTOR, and we DID find a way to bring the subject of saucers into our program. One of our guests on that early 1980s show was none other than Betty Hill, the woman who made alien abductions famous in America. She took a polygraph for us on TV and passed it.
All of you avid ufologists surely know the story of Betty and Barney Hill, but for those who need a quick ufology refresher course, here’s the scoop:
Betty and Barney Hill were an inter-racial couple living in New Hampshire. Barney worked for the Post Office. Returning from a car trip September 19, 1961, they saw a strange light in the sky. They stopped their car to get a better look. The light approached. Later, they claimed they could see “beings” through windows or portholes in what was a large flying saucer. Then came a period of missing time. When this occurred, there were no stories of alien abductions being bandied about. Alien abduction had not even begun to emerge as one of the century’s great urban myths. (This is not to say that alien abductions are a myth and do not occur - merely to acknowledge that ever since the publication of Whitley Strieber’s COMMUNION, they have taken on the grandiose proportion of myth in our culture).
Betty and Barney Hill were the first abductees known to have submitted to hypnosis in order to recovery memories of exactly what happened to them. They filled in the missing time with recollections of being taken aboard the flying saucer and probed in medical experiments of some sort. The details can all be found in the book about their experience, THE INTERRUPTED JOURNEY. Suffice it to say, for the purpose of this article, that under hypnosis, Betty Hill recalled having been shown a STAR MAP by the humanoid aliens who she claimed abducted her and her husband. Both Betty and Barney described and drew the aliens in a similar way - and that description became the basis for what we commonly think of today as the “Grey.”
Later, Leonard Stringfield talked with other abductees and military people who claimed to see corpses of this species of alien. He added details that are consistent with the Betty and Barney Hill description: The aliens’ approximate height is three to four and one-half feet tall, weighing about 40 pounds. They have almond-shaped eyes, large heads, like the head on a 5-month old fetus, thin necks, and no earlobes. Their noses consist of two nares with only a slight protuberance. The mouths are a small “slit” without lips. The bodies are hairless, or with slight fuzz. They have long, thin arms that reach to their knees, no thumbs, four fingers (two fingers are longer than the others), and a slight webbing between fingers. The beings also have short, thin legs.
Barney did not describe the star map, but Betty recalled it in detail under hypnosis. She even drew a picture of it. She claimed the aliens explained to her that it was a map of the stars in their “trading group”, thus it was a sort of trade map that showed the location of the earth and that of the aliens’ home star system, a double star. The aliens did not tell her the English name of their star system. The only clue as to where these aliens might have originated was in the layout of the star map itself. Was Betty’s memory accurate? If so, how accurate? What could the double-star system have been?
When we invited Betty Hill to be a guest on LIE DETECTOR, we had to find the best way to ask questions that would substantiate or invalidate her story. We decided to focus on her STAR MAP. The polygraph could not be used to determine whether Betty’s story was fact or fiction, or whether the details were precise or fuzzy in her memory. The polygraph can only measure the subject’s beliefs. For example, did Betty Hill REALLY believe that she saw the star map when she was aboard an alien flying saucer, or did she deliberately invent the story? Was it a fabricated story, or was it her best and most honest recollection of something she BELIEVED really happened in her life?
The polygrapher was Ed Gelb, former President of the American Polygraph Association. As I mentioned in a previous FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD! column, Ed Gelb later conducted polygraphs of those who witnessed the Travis Walton abduction on November 5, 1975. Ironically, the Walton abduction occurred shortly after a made-for-TV movie about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction fourteen years prior titled THE UFO INCIDENT. Some debunkers suggested Walton got the idea for his abduction tale from that movie. Never mind that Walton neither saw, nor heard about the movie. But that’s another story . . .
On LIE DETECTOR, we found Betty Hill to be TRUTHFUL. The polygraph results left no doubt that Betty Hill sincerely believed that she saw that star map aboard a saucer when she was abducted. It doesn’t prove that it didn’t come to her in a dream, or that it wasn’t just a series of mental images that popped into her mind during hypnotic regression. In other words, her truthful result didn’t prove that the abduction truly happened. However, it was strong evidence that Betty Hill didn’t just “make up” her story - it was no hoax. She believed it happened. And she believed the details of the star map were an accurate representation of what the aliens showed her.
It so happens that an astronomer named Marjorie Fish studied the Betty Hill star map in extraordinary detail. She wanted to use the data to try to establish where the aliens came from. She erected a three-dimensional model of the star map, hanging stars on strings from the ceiling in her home, so they could be seen from many different angles. In her model, she did her best to make the distances between the stars, and their relative sizes, accurate to the proportions and distances in Betty Hill’s drawing. After looking at the model from many different angles, she finally came to the conclusion that the double-star in Betty Hill’s drawing was the star system ZETA RETICULA. As Richard Hoagland has pointed out (www.enterprisemission.com), Zeta Reticula is 33 light-years from earth. He marvels over the numerology connection with Masonry. The highest level a Mason can reach is the 33rd degree. Reticulum means “fisherman’s net” - and so there is also a connection to Christian imagery. (”It’s all a code,” he insists, and he says we can’t understand the power elite until we can decipher the codes in which they tip their secret meanings).
What are the odds that by selecting Zeta Reticula, that Marjorie Fish reached the correct conclusion about Betty Hill’s star map? That depends on many factors. There’s been a continuing debate and battle in the UFO literature about this very issue. The principal writer is nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, who defends the Betty Hill star map research. The main detractor, not unexpectedly, is debunker Philip Klass, who challenges the possible accuracy on many grounds. First, of course, he does not accept that Betty Hill was actually abducted, but leaving that aside, he asks what the odds are that under hypnosis, many months or years after the supposed abduction event, that Betty Hill could remember the star map details so accurately?
If she was incorrect in the distances she drew on her map, even by ten or twenty percent, wouldn’t that have led Marjorie Fish to a different conclusion? Maybe other double-star systems would have fit the data better, in that case, and she would not have come up with “Zeta Reticula.” Klass asks how long Betty Hill could possibly have looked at this star map in the spaceship. Does she have photographic memory? If she saw it only for a minute or two, if that long, how could she possibly have been so precise. The questions he asks are logical and reasonable. Stanton Friedman’s reply has been that during an experience so profound, traumatic, and intense as an abduction, the subconscious mind probably burns in all the details, since they have such high emotion attached to them. However, under most abduction scenarios - and certainly in the case of Betty and Barney Hill - they consciously remembered virtually nothing that happened during the missing time. Were it not for deep hypnosis, the time would have just been a blank and a fog, something erased from consciousness. Could the details of the star map have been restored so successfully and accurately by the hypnotic trance?
Most people in the field of ufology tend to believe that the Hills were actually abducted. You can believe in the abduction, and you can even believe (as we confirmed on the show LIE DETECTOR) that Betty Hill does not believe she fabricated the star map story. But that doesn’t mean you need to accept the remarkable possibility that she reproduced that map perfectly. And if she missed on some of the details, then you’d have to say that Marjorie fish probably pinpointed the wrong star system.
Why is this so important? What difference does it make, really, whether we know where these “Greys” come from, since we are technologically incapable of traveling to visit them anyway? Believe it or not, it’s strikingly important, precisely because much of modern-day ufology is wedded to the notion that the “Greys” are from Zeta Reticula. So much so, that we even hear some claims of certain “government papers” referring to the Zeta Reticulans.
This is where your personal “disinformation meter” should be flashing red. For example, consider the testimony of Bob Lazar about the U.S. secretly having alien technology and alien discs hidden at sector S-4 of Area 51, with flying saucers in hangars. We can debate the credibility of Lazar from now until sunset, but even the debunkers have to admit a few things that are definitely REAL about Mr. Lazar’s claims. Lazar was able to take witnesses out to Mail Box Road near Area 51 at the exact date and time of test flights of weird and exotic aeroforms. John Lear, son of the designer of the Lear Jet, was one of those witnesses. Lazar knew when those flights would be. They were photographed and videotaped as a result, and the world began to take the possibility of UFO’s at Area 51 seriously. Lazar also produced a legitimate W-2 form indicating he was paid by Naval Intelligence with a security clearance that has the letters “MAJ” (as in MAJESTIC - MJ-12).
Bob Lazar tells us on his video, which is commercially available, that while employed at Area 51 he was shown a book called “The Government bible.” He stated that the government bible told an alternative version of mankind’s history to the one we are conventionally taught. That includes that we are a species created from primitive hominids by deliberate genetic manipulation - that our genetic code was “tampered with” over twenty specific times during the course of our biological history. Now here’s the rub: Bob Lazar states that “The Government bible” stated that the aliens that did this were from ZETA RETICULA, the double-star system. Further, the photos of the aliens Bob Lazar saw, and the supplementary descriptions, conformed with what we have come to think of as the “Grey” aliens with the large almond-shaped eyes.
There was no explanation as to the likelihood that a double-star system would have planets that could harbor life. It’s difficult enough, it seems, finding other stars in “single star” systems that have planets capable of supporting life. If there were TWO stars involved, wouldn’t the amount of heat from the stars fluctuate incredibly as the planets rotated around the two suns?
What is the possibility that Bob Lazar really was shown such a “Government bible” and that he was subjected to disinformation? Could he have been deliberately manipulated - made to reach certain conclusions that may or may not have been true? Could he have been shocked and amazed and surprised and astonished by what he read and saw - to the point that he went public with the information, and he genuinely believed it? But was the information he saw true? Remember this: If Marjorie Fish was wrong about the Betty Hill star map and she erroneously injected Zeta Reticula into ufology, then government disinformation specialists have found it convenient to continue injecting the same “error” into bogus documents used to befuddle, excite, and startle ufologists for the last decade.
Similarly, Col. Wendelle Stevens, publisher of UFO Photo Archives in Tucson, has published an abduction book that refers to a Zeta Reticula connection. It’s even called ABDUCTION FROM RETICULUM. It’s the story of William Hermann who encountered, photographed, and then was abducted into a flying saucer in North Carolina. He claimed continued contact, continued abductions, and communications - and claimed to have an alien artifact. His abductors were “Greys” and they told him they were from Zeta Reticula.
Read the last installment of FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD (if you haven’t already), to learn about “intelligence agents” code-named “Falcon” and “Condor”. Both appeared in silhouette on a much-promoted UFO documentary called UFO COVERUP LIVE around 1989. The show was sponsored in part by AT&T, which put in heavy ad dollars. And it featured “Falcon” and “Condor” with electronically disguised voices describing the anatomy of the “Grey” aliens and also stated that they were from ZETA RETICULA! (Of course, they also threw in the observation that one of these aliens, code-named EBE-1, liked strawberry ice cream, provoking laughs and tipping the hand that there was disinformation involved in the information).
“The Government bible”, the William Hermann abduction case, and the testimony of “Falcon” and “Condor”, among others, inevitably must be connected to what we think about the credibility that Marjorie Fish interpreted the star map correctly, and that Betty Hill made a perfect representation of what the aliens showed her when she made her drawing.
If you believe in UFOs, and that aliens pilot many of them, but you have your doubts about the precision of the claims of Fish and Hill, then you must call into question other aspects of ufology you might also be tempted to believe. For example, the “Government bible” at Area 51, as well as the accuracy of what William Hermann was told by his abductors (and note that he has an excellent abduction case with many supporting details). Also, every instance where “Zeta Reticula” pops up in connection with “Grey” aliens in any purported “genuine, official documents”, or any time “government agents” such as “Falcon” and “Condor” spouted the term.
Of course, if like Stanton Friedman, you’ll bet your money that Marjorie Fish got it right, none of these other issues will be any problem for you. Then it’s an open-and-shut case that the “Greys” ARE from Zeta-Reticula, so all the rest of this information gains credibility as a result.
I know from my experience on LIE DETECTOR that Betty Hill was truthful - that she was not a hoaxer or liar - but that doesn’t prove to me that her star map was accurate. I have to admit it’s hard for me to believe she could have totally, accurately duplicated the star map. For that reason, I’ve always felt that there was a large possibility that Marjorie Fish got it wrong - which does not mean that I reject Betty Hill’s abduction claims.
I have been intrigued for years with the possibility that Bob Lazar accurately reported what he saw at Area 51 - i.e., that he did see tests of flying saucers that had “small chairs” in them as if built for tiny aliens. Perhaps he was “seeded” with false information from a “Government bible” that was science fiction, developed as a “cover story” to hide the real TRUTH about the origin of the discs he saw. And if you want to ask me what that real TRUTH is, I can only tell you that I’m still flying my hovercraft over Hollywood Boulevard looking for it. One of these days, I’m sure to find it . . .
This is your AlienZoo correspondent in Hollywood, signing off for FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD until next Friday. See you then!