It Has Been 65 Years Since The Alien Abduction of Betty And Barney Hill

Get the full story in my book, "Two Lost Hours: The Betty And Barney Hill UFO Abduction, 65 Years Later" at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJY8N8CT

Sixty-five years ago this week, a Portsmouth couple drove home through the White Mountains and arrived hours later than they’d planned; the story of what happened in that gap became the template for the modern alien abduction narrative, and the psychiatrist who drew it out of them believed half of it.

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Originally aired: September 15, 2026
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On the week of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Betty and Barney Hill UFO incident, Weird Darkness retraces the September 19th to 20th, 1961 drive through New Hampshire's White Mountains that became America's first widely reported alien abduction account, from the light over Route 3 to the Project Blue Book file, the hypnosis tapes in Dr. Benjamin Simon's Boston office, the Zeta Reticuli star map, and the sixty-five-year fight over what any of it means.It opens at 10:05 PM in a Colebrook restaurant, as Betty and Barney Hill of Portsmouth start the last leg home from Montreal in a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air with their dachshund Delsey in the back seat. South of Lancaster, Betty spots a light below the moon that keeps pace with the car past Cannon Mountain and Franconia Notch, and two miles north of North Woodstock it comes down over the highway; Barney walks into a field with 7x50 binoculars and sees figures in shiny black uniforms watching him from a row of windows before he runs back to the car shouting that they're going to be captured. Two sets of beeps from the trunk bracket a thirty-five-mile stretch of road neither of them can remember, and the kitchen clock reads after five when they get home, two hours later than the drive should have taken.From there the episode follows the paper trail: Barney's scuffed shoes, a dozen shiny circles on the trunk lid that send a compass needle spinning, a torn dress dusted with pink powder, and Betty's September 21st call to Pease Air Force Base that produced Air Force Information Report 100-1-61, a document that never mentions the figures Barney saw. Hayden Planetarium lecturer Walter Webb interviews the couple for six hours for NICAP, two IBM men work out the missing two hours in November, and Betty begins five nights of dreams about small men with Jimmy Durante noses who examine her aboard a craft. Barney's health collapses into ulcers, hypertension, and a ring of growths on his groin, and in December 1963 the couple lands in the Back Bay office of Dr. Benjamin Simon, a Second World War Army psychiatrist who hypnotizes them separately over the following months while a tape recorder runs. Barney describes wraparound...