Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [45]
The "contactees"—those who have experienced actual "close encounters of the third kind"—are the ones most celebrated by UFO devotees. The National Enquirer adores them and exaggerates their accounts with glee. One such highly touted person was Betty Hill, who said that in 1961, while driving with her husband in New Hampshire, she and Mr. Hill were abducted aboard a flying saucer and underwent various indignities that she recalled only well after she first reported the incident. Her claim has been a cause célèbres among UFO nuts ever since. It was immortalized in John Fuller's book Incident at Exeter. Fuller has brought us other thrillers of pseudoscience such as Arigo, Surgeon of the Rusty Knife, and the Geller epic, My Story. I will deal mainly with Mrs. Hill's "star map" claim, but you should know that a Dr. Simon, who hypnotized her, said afterwards, "It was a dream. The abduction did not happen." Despite this statement, the doctor was depicted by believers and the press as being highly supportive of the Hills' claim! It seems evident, based on research done by Robert Sheaffer, a prominent UFO investigator, that Mrs. Hill saw the planet Jupiter, talked her husband into believing it was a UFO, and then imagined that she had been taken aboard and made to forget the experience, which she remembered only after a dream of the supposed event kept recurring. But when she had her story in full bloom, Betty Hill was able to suddenly recall—three years after the event—that she had seen a navigation map in the UFO control room, and she sketched it for posterity. This map is one of several that are said to support the Hill claim.
The first thing that made the amateur astronomer in me suspicious is that her map resembles a wallpaper design more than a star chart. Stars are not so uniformly distributed in space. She has marked upon it some "trade routes" of the aliens' world, and therein lies a big reason for some of the subsequent acceptance of the map. Marjorie Fish, presently working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, tried to match the Hill map with reality and thought she had succeeded when she somewhat rearranged the viewpoint and redrew a section of the constellation known as Reticulum (the Net) to conform. At first glance there does seem to be a rough correspondence. There is also some correspondence with a third map, of the constellation Pegasus, which Betty Hill spotted in the New York Times. She immediately adopted it and showed the correspondence with her map. But my fine hand is in there, too, for included in the fourth map is the map of the Leo/Cancer area that appears a few pages back. On this one, too, a good match-up is possible—certainly as good as Fish's. In fact, better!
Betty Hill's drawing of the aliens' stellar navigation map with "trade routes" indicated. "S" designates the sun; the arrow points to the aliens' home star.
Is this star map a good match for the Hill map? If so, then anything can be made to fit. For convenience, I chose the Leo/ Cancer map that appears on page 59, added the "trade routes," and got as good a match as any!
The constellation Pegasus as it appears on an ordinary star map, with Hill's "trade routes" added as she saw them.
A section of the constellation Reticulum, reoriented and drawn by Marjorie Fish with Hill's "trade routes" added.
But the final blow to this terrible evidence comes when, as suggested by Carl Sagan, Robert Sheaffer, and Steven Soter, we remove all the "trade routes" and see that there is no hope of finding