Betty and Barney Hill case file: primary documents

Betty Hill typed a letter to NICAP Director Donald Keyhoe on September 26, 1961, six days after the encounter, having borrowed his book from the Portsmouth Public Library that same week, her first book ever read on the subject of UFOs.

Barney Hill sketched the object he had observed hours after arriving home on September 20, 1961, contemporaneous with the event itself, not years later as some skeptical accounts have claimed.

Betty reported the incident to Major Paul W. Henderson at Pease Air Force Base. The report was logged as a Project Blue Book Air Intelligence Information Report through the 100th Bomb Wing, Strategic Air Command.

NICAP investigator Walter Webb, an astronomer, conducted an in-person interview with the Hills on October 21, 1961, documenting their consistent account of the object’s size, lights, and disc shape. Webb’s contemporaneous notes record no mention of abduction or entities at this stage, three years before the hypnosis sessions introduced that material.

Under hypnosis sessions with psychiatrist Benjamin Simon from January to June 1964, Barney and Betty Hill independently recalled a sequence of events extending beyond their conscious memories of the pursuit and the missing time. This material, not the 1961 Blue Book report, is the source of the widely known abduction narrative.