Betty and Barney Hill Abduction, Part II: The Gas Station Bathroom Exhibit, the Official Hill Archives, and the Incident at Exeter

September 30, 2009 — ...and the best thing about writing a Part II is that you don’t have to come up with any type of creative introduction other than to just recap Part I. So here goes. In the previous article, I recounted the semi-reenactment on the part of me and my wife of the fateful trip of Barney and Betty Hill, famous alien abductees, as well as our visit to their eventual final resting places. I say semi-reenactment, of course, because our retracing of their route left out the bits about being hijacked by aliens and having our noses lit up by an extraterrestrial game of Operation. Not by choice, mind you.

That was more than a year ago now. In the missing time since then, we’ve come across other Hill-related oddities worth visiting in New Hampshire, including a homemade alien abduction exhibit in a gas station bathroom and the official university-held collection of original artifacts and documentation from the Hill incident.

I’m going to start with the former because, well, you stopped reading the sentence at that point. I am, however, including the giant caveat that it’s easy to make tons of topics seem more worth writing about by just throwing lots of hyperbolic phrases decorated with capital letters and exclamation points at them. In this case, though, it’s going to be impossible to do better than the simple phrase “homemade alien abduction exhibit in a gas station bathroom.”

And that’s exactly what it is. The strange bathroom can be found in the town of Lincoln, at the Franconia Notch Irving Express gas station located right off exit 33 on I-93/Route 3, the same route down which the Hills traversed that dark night decades past

Upon pulling up to a pump, the first inkling you get that this gas station is more than mere pit stop is the large eight-foot-square painting of a spindly, big-headed alien standing in the middle of a dark forest road, which is hanging beside the ice freezer where any other gas station would have a vinyl banner hawking beer, cigarettes, and stale snack cakes. Above the painting are the words, “First Close Encounter of the Third Kind, Betty and Barney Hill, Sept. 19th, 1961."

I didn’t notice this until after I’d returned and was sorting through the pictures from my visit, but the painting is actually signed and dated way down in the corner, inches above the paved parking lot. The author’s full name is difficult to make out for sure, but the last name is probably Thibeault and the first name seems to start with an A. He or she shouldn’t be too hard to track down, though. Just look for the person with the “painted giant alien tableau for gas station” feather on their resume. The date on the painting, though, is most definitely 2009…making this relatively breaking news on my part (working on the “relatively breaking news” icon as we speak).

After I pretended to fill up my gas tank, all the while merely checking out the painting, I went inside to see the inevitable alien-themed wares for sale. The gas station had some, of course, although not as many as I thought an eight-foot-square painting of an extraterrestrial would presage. Clustered around the register counter were various trinkets in alien form, including day-glo inflatables and key chains, as well as a few copies of the Marden and Friedman book Captured, which I referenced in Part I of this article.

As I started to leave the station, trying to weigh whether the outside painting by itself was enough to merit more than a passing mention in this article, my bladder made a better decision than my brain. I memorialized the moment with a Twitter post at the time. When I walked into that gas station’s single unisex bathroom, I felt like Ali Baba discovering the phrase, “Open, Sesame.”

The walls inside this relatively spacious bathroom were plastered all over with articles about the Hills and other alien incidents, facsimiles of official documentation, drawings of extraterrestrials, photographs, spreadsheets (yup, spreadsheets) regarding alien encounters, and, most oddly (if possible), images from random science fiction shows and movies, including Star Trek and Alien, both of which were tacked up in positions of honor right above the commode.

It looked like one of those rooms they have in police detective movies, where evidence and assorted paper slips are tacked everywhere on boards while the protagonist tries to fit them together to solve some crime “before it happens again.”

The coolest thing about the display was probably that it was in a bathroom. Unfortunately, for that same reason, propriety doesn’t allow you to stay in there long enough to take it all in. Might be a good thing, though. If you stick around in there long enough, that bathroom might make you believe.

At the very least, it’ll make you leave with a big grin of satisfaction, nodding to the cashier like you’ve just been indoctrinated into some private and rare mystery before buying a Twix, a Coke Zero, and an alien key chain and getting into your car and driving off into the sunset. Or at least, that’s how my time at the gas station ended, minus the sunset. It was noon, and I was headed south.

Anyway, I expect access to cheesy stuff like extraterrestrial museums in gas station bathrooms, but I was surprised at being allowed anywhere near this next bit of oddity. It turns out that, in the spring of 2009, the Betty and Barney Hill archive, which had been donated to the University of New Hampshire in Durham, went on temporary public display at the Milne Special Collection and Archives Department of the UNH library.

The archive includes letters and personal journals from Betty and Barney Hill, audio tapes and transcripts of their hypnosis sessions, essays, newspaper clippings, reports, photographs, artwork, and even artifacts from that surreal night.

Because I couldn’t make it to see the display during the regularly operating Milne Special Collection hours, I took the rare step of contacting them to see if it was possible to view the exhibit after hours and the even rarer step of being honest about who I was instead of lying about being a TIME magazine reporter.

One of the curators at the UNH library, Dale, responded to my e-mail and informed me that she’d be more than happy to allow me to see the display after hours, despite the low level of professionalism on display at my O.T.I.S. website. Dale is what we in the business call “awesome.”

We went up to Durham expecting to just spend a few moments gawking and photographing the few items of the enormous collection that were actually on display, and we certainly got to do that. The public exhibit was located in a hallway on an upper floor of the library, where the Milne Special Collection and Archives Department is housed, and included one of Betty’s handwritten journals, a box of her notes on extraterrestrial sightings, a few pieces of artwork including a paper mâche bust and painting of an alien, some photographs of the couple, and other assorted bits. Just enough to satiate the superficial level of interest I have toward everything in life.

The piece I was the most interested in from the start, even before arriving, was the purple dress Betty wore the night of her abduction, for that reason and because she claimed to have found some unidentifiable pink, powdery substance on it that apparently defied scientific analysis. Also because I’m into women’s fashions of the 1960s. They had the dress displayed on a mannequin torso inside one of the glass cases. Immediately apparent is the missing swatch that had been removed for analysis, and the discolored patches from the mystery substance was evident as well. The analysis findings were posted on the wall near the dress, but they must have been over my head, because I don’t remember them (my brain has evolved a method of blocking things out that I don’t understand...it’s a handy survival mechanism).

Anyway, the dress should have been the highlight for me, but then Dale offered us the chance to see the files containing most of the original materials from the archive. After dragging her to the nearest computer and showing her my site again, she still maintained that it was okay, so we pulled up a chair and I played the part of studious researcher that I’d seen so many times in the movies.

The first items I pulled out were the original stained pencil drawings that Betty and Barney had sketched of the spaceship that had accosted them and the famous star map that Betty claimed was shown to her by one of the alien crew. This was actually way cooler than the dress to me. I’d seen these rude drawings reproduced in books since I was a child, and here were the originals, right in my very own white-linen-gloved hands. Oh, those weren’t mine. Dale gave them to me to wear to protect the delicate photos from the horrible oils that my hands excrete. She could tell I was that type, I guess.

Next were the hypnosis transcripts. They had the original tapes, and it would have been swell to hear them, but they were off being digitized or somesuch other more worthwhile purpose than me excreting oils on them, or they were there and I was too chicken to push my luck and ask to hear them, I can’t remember. Still, the transcripts were the next best thing, and I got to read the dramatic memories of Hills’ emotional abduction experience vividly surfacing/being falsely created right in the moment.

After that, we read through a few more letters and journal entries and viewed a few more photos before taking our leave, grateful to the UNH library, and Dale personally, for the great opportunity and cautiously watching the skies on our drive home.

Actually, I probably need to apologize to you for speaking about the exhibit in such glowing terms since the Betty and Barney Hill collection is no longer on public display. However, something tells me that UNH will have to bring it out again in two years for the for the 50th anniversary special deluxe edition of the event.

In one of her letters that I got to read with my shamefully naked eyeballs, Betty Hill typed the phrase, “P.S. New Hampshire is swarming with UFO’s.” Besides being a great documentary title on the subject, she was right in a way. Her incident wasn’t the only high-profile UFO event that occurred in that state in that decade.

On a September night in 1965, on a dark road just outside of the town of Exeter, a local 18-year-old hitchhiker by the name of Norman Muscarello witnessed some intensely bright, low-lying aerial lights unearthly enough to panic him into going to the police.

And while that’s usually the point in every tabloid-published UFO story where the account dies with a resounding “wacko,” in this particular case it’s where the story gets interesting...and borderline credible...or as close as these types of accounts get to that famed wonderland, at least.

Muscarello was able to convince the local authorities to accompany him back to the spot that night. Two officers, David Hunt and Eugene Bertrand, returned to the location on Route 150 between Exeter and Kensington where the cosmic jacklighting occurred and actually witnessed the phenomenon at close range themselves. Meanwhile, other corroborating reports of strange sky sightings came in to the police station.

And that’s why the Incident at Exeter started making at least national headlines (possibly international...it’s hard for me to gauge the whole world sometimes), finding itself in various media reports, Air Force files, and a snug little niche in the overall UFO mythology.

Besides alien visitors, the time of year, the decade, and the national response, the other thing that the Hill abduction and the Muscarello experience had in common was investigative reporter and columnist John G. Fuller. In 1966, he published best-selling nonfiction works about each of these incidents (The Interrupted Journey and The Incident at Exeter, respectively), further ensuring that these stories would stay afloat amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the surface that is popular culture.

Now, the fine print on this story is there’s an air force base in nearby Portsmouth, and according to the official Air Force explanation there were some sort of military air activity going on at the time. However, even if the Air Force hadn’t of admitted to anything, it’s a reasonable assumption that strange lights are still an FDA-approved side effect of Air Force bases. And while that’s enough of an explanation for a lot of people, the story still just won’t die no matter how many attempted murderers it has.

In fact, in September of 2009, the town of Exeter celebrated its first festival commemorating the 44-year-old event. I missed going, but that’s a mistake I hope to correct at future festivals.

These days, the relevant area of Route 150, also known as Amesbury Road, where Muscarello witnessed the UFO activity is mostly taken up by an equestrian center, the white fences of which nicely delineate the fields that made him famous.

In the end, the cops never caught the aliens. Some say they still roam those horse pastures, awaiting just the right shade of night and just the right errant hitchhiker...unaware that the practice stopped being cool by the end of the 1970s.

New Hampshire in the 60s, man. One day I’d like to get my hands on the 50-year-old intergalactic travel brochure that blurbed, “When in the Milky Way, visit New Hampshire"


UPDATE (6.10.2013): I accidentally found myself refilling at the gas station a few weeks back for the first time since my original visit. There's still that glorious plastic-protected alien mural on the front of the station, and they've added a chalkboard adjacent to it so that you can write about your own encounters. They also still sell alien-themed gifts beside the usual gas station cups of jerky and months-old Frosted Honey Buns. The only change, and this was a little bit sad to see, was that they took all the materials that decorated that bathroom and moved it to the wall of the store itself, just under the ceiling where it's hard to read. But the real problem is that they just lack the style of a bathroom museum. It's still worth a stop, though, whenever you have that all-too-familiar craving for Swedish fish and alien lore.

Also, since , the state of New Hampshire has officially recognized that terrifying September night with a historical roadside sign.

Betty and Barney Hill Abduction, Part I: The Route and the Graves

September 10, 2009 — You’re in danger of missing an anniversary, so consider this article a calendar reminder. In a little over a week, on September 19, 2009, we’ll all happily arrive at the 48th anniversary of the supposed alien abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Don’t worry, you still have time to run out and get a card.

On the night of September 19th and on into the early morning of September 20th in the year 1961, husband and wife Barney and Betty Hill were traveling back from vacation in Montreal to their home in Portsmouth, NH, when, according to their story, they were followed by a spaceship and eventually accosted, kidnapped, examined, and then released back into the wild by its extraterrestrial crew.

The event has since become the best documented and most famous case of alien abduction in the history of ufology, introducing into mainstream culture such what-was-life-like-before-them terms as “hypnotic regression,” “missing time,” and “anal probe,” as well as cementing a template for the current mythology of alien visitors in both our fictions and the abduction claims that have succeeded it. The story of the Hills grew big enough, in fact, that it prompted a best-selling book by John Fuller entitled The Interrupted Journey, inspired a television movie called The UFO Incident starring James Earl Jones, and was subjected to debunking by famous intellectual Carl Sagan.

Last year, on the night of the 47th anniversary of the event, I and my wife got into our car, drove up to northern New Hampshire, and then re-traced the route taken by Betty and Barney Hill on that fateful night. We chose this randomly numbered anniversary because we had just moved to the Granite State and didn’t want to wait three years for a more momentously numbered one. In addition, I like commemorating events a few years before it makes sense to because then everybody who is prompted by timely media interest on the more legitimate anniversary to research it will come across my article. Life is made up of a series of schemes.

So right before New England officially switched over to its renowned Autumn outfit, we trekked north to Lancaster, NH, waited for the appropriate hour of darkness, and then basically turned the car around and drove back home. Technically, we should have started in Montreal, I guess, but the Hills’ trip didn’t start getting interesting until hereabouts and 2008 was a time of great confusion over what documentation you needed to cross the Canuckian border.

I had prepped in advance for the trip by reading Captured, a recently published account of the Hill abduction and its aftermath that was co-authored by Kathleen Marden, the niece of Betty Hill, and Stanton T. Friedman, nuclear physicist and famous UFO guy. That’s in addition to my life-long preparation of watching every alien abduction movie I could get my hands on, including Communion, Close Encounters, Fire in the Sky, Altered, and whatever clips I could find on YouTube of the so far unreleased-to-DVD The UFO Incident.

The temperature on the night of our own journey was crisp, bordering on cold, and the sky was perfectly clear for UFO watching. We popped the X-Files series soundtrack into the car stereo and took off, our eyes enthusiastically searching the sky, with the occasional glance spared for the darkness of the road in front of us.

According to their accounts, the Hills were driving south on Route 3 when they noticed an erratic light in the sky that seemed to be following them. Eventually, that erratic light grew into a strange ship, which soon landed, trapping the Hills. The ship’s inhabitants then escorted the dazed couple into the spacecraft and subjected them to the scientific rituals of some sort of intergalactic catch-and-release program.

The Hills described the physical appearance of the aliens as Irish Nazi Jimmy Durantes. Also as what has become known as classic “grays” with thin, short bodies, oversized heads and large, dark eyes that even those of us who haven’t been abducted can now instantly recognize thanks to the flypaper that is popular culture. Obviously, that latter description doesn’t sound anything like an Irish Nazi Jimmy Durante, but the Hills’ story is a little confusing on the appearance of the aliens, as well as on other points. I don’t mean for that to sound cynical. It was a rough night for them.

Actually, most of their memories of the night were unearthed a few years later, under hypnosis and further reflection. Their immediate impressions of the night were hazy, disjointed, and included stretches of missing time—everything a long, midnight trip through the mountains of New Hampshire would be even without alien interruption.

Certainly our own more recent trek down that same road seemed if not as surreal as the Hills’ experience, at least somewhere in the same thesaurus entry. But I guess that’s more because of what it was intrinsically, a late-night re-enactment of an event I don’t believe happened in the first place but am still kind of glad that a lot of people kind of do.

Of course, the whole story is actually more detailed and complex than my summary, but I’ve got a lot to pack into this two-part article and can’t spend too much time on the actual reason for the article. Plus, some of the details will be more relevant in Part II, where I’ll have to come up with all new excuses of why I’m not delving into them.

During the Sixties, the main route for getting from the top of New Hampshire to the bottom was Route 3. It still pretty much is, just with the addition of an interstate highway. As a result, the Hills’ approximate route is easy enough to follow, as long as you pay attention to where it merges and unmerges with Interstate 93. And I mean you because I didn’t and ended up having to retrace my own steps in order to retrace theirs.

In fact, due to the Hills own fuzzy recollections of that night and the various road and zoning changes over the past 50 years, we still might not have followed their course exactly, but we also didn’t get abducted, probed, or have our memories erased (that I remember), so I count it as a trade-off.

Even though a lot of the route is highway, much of it is still unlighted and highly spooky at the time of night that we drove it, especially through the mountainous Franconia Notch area. Just like the Hills did 47 years before, we pulled over and got out of our car at various points along the route. Of course, they were checking out the pursuing UFO in disbelief and being terrified into flight. We were merely taking pictures and spooking ourselves back into the car.

Also like the Hills before, we passed by various landmarks, including what used to be the rock formation known as The Old Man of the Mountain. Back in the Hills’ day, he still had a face. These days, he’s nothing but landslide remnants and an awkward New Hampshire marketing icon. When we drove past it, we could detect the smooth black outline of its decapitated stump against the stars. We also passed by the 75-year-old Jack O’Lantern Resort in Woodstock, with its pumpkin face sign that the Hills probably would also have passed back then.

As to the actual touchdown point of the encounter, the spot is basically unknown, even to the now-deceased participants. Betty claimed to be able to find it later in life, but by then she was so immersed in UFO culture and her status within it that even UFO believers were starting to doubt some of her assertions.

Finally, we made it home...completely uninterrupted, I’m loathe to add. I basically spent the whole trip forgetting to turn off my high-beams for passing cars going in the opposite direction, braking for phantom moose, and wondering if anybody else on the road was saying, Large Marge-style, “On this very night, 47 years ago, on this very stretch of road...” For the record, I also didn’t see anything I could have even forced myself to mistake for a UFO, but then again, I probably would’ve mistaken an actual UFO for not being one, I’m so skeptical in general.

In the end, for us, it was only a three-hour tour. For the Hills, it lasted until their dying days. Barney passed away at the young age of 46 due to a cerebral hemorrhage, eight years after the incident. Betty died in 2004, after living a long life fully enmeshed and celebrated in UFO culture. They’re both buried at the back of Greenwood Cemetery off North Rd. in Kingston, NH. Below each of the names on their cemetery plaques is stated, “of The Interrupted Journey.”

Anyway, as I mentioned, we’re now only a few days away from the 48th anniversary of the event, and in the intervening year since our little expedition, we’ve had a couple of other Hill-related adventures, which I’ll recount in Part II of this article.

The best thing about writing Part I of a two-part article is that I don’t have to come up with a tidy conclusion yet...

Part II gets a whole lot cooler with a New Hampshire gas station dedicated to the event and the original records, hypnosis transcripts, and artifacts from that night, access to which was kindly granted by the University of New Hampshire. I'll even get into the thematically and geographically related Incident at Exeter.