The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [50]
To look at the man and to listen to his story you had an immediate urge to believe him. Maybe it was his appearance. He was dressed in well worn, but neat, overalls. He had slightly graying hair and the most honest pair of eyes I’ve ever seen.
Adamski’s star slowly faded as he aged, but he self-published other books and was a long-standing fixture at conventions of flying saucer ‘believers’.
The first alien abduction story in the modern genre was that of Betty and Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple, she a social worker and he a Post Office employee. During a late-night drive in 1961 through the White Mountains, Betty spotted a bright, initially star-like UFO that seemed to follow them. Because Barney feared it might harm them, they left the main highway for narrow mountain roads, arriving home two hours later than they’d expected. The experience prompted Betty to read a book that described UFOs as spaceships from other worlds; their occupants were little men who sometimes abducted humans.
Soon after, she experienced a terrifying, repetitive nightmare in which she and Barney were abducted and taken aboard the UFO. Barney overheard her describing this dream to friends, co-workers and volunteer UFO investigators. (It’s curious that Betty didn’t discuss it with her husband directly.) By a week or so after the experience, they were describing a ‘pancake’-like UFO with uniformed figures seen through the craft’s transparent windows.
Several years later, Barney’s psychiatrist referred him to a Boston hypnotherapist, Benjamin Simon, MD. Betty came to be hypnotized as well. Under hypnosis they separately filled in details of what had happened during the ‘missing’ two hours: they watched the UFO land on the highway and were taken, partly immobilized, inside the craft where short, grey, humanoid creatures with long noses (a detail discordant with the current paradigm) subjected them to unconventional medical examinations, including a needle in her navel (before amniocentesis had been invented on Earth). There are those who now believe that eggs were taken from Betty’s ovaries and sperm from Barney, although that isn’t part of the original story.* The captain showed Betty a map of interstellar space with the ship’s routes marked.
[* In more recent times, Ms Hill has written that in real abductions, ‘no sexual interest is shown. However, frequently they help themselves to some of [the abductee’s] belongings, such as fishing rods, jewelry of different types, eyeglasses or a cup of laundry soap.’]
Martin S. Kottmeyer has shown that many of the motifs in the Hills’ account can be found in a 1953 motion picture, Invaders from Mars. And Barney’s story of what the aliens looked like, especially their enormous eyes, emerged in a hypnosis session just twelve days after the airing of an episode of the television series The Outer Limits’ in which such an alien was portrayed.
The Hill case was widely discussed. It was made into a 1975 TV movie that introduced the idea that short, grey alien abductors are among us into the psyches of millions of people. But even the few scientists of the time who thought that some UFOs might in fact be alien spaceships were wary. The alleged encounter was conspicuous by its absence from the list of suggestive UFO cases compiled by James E. McDonald, a University of Arizona atmospheric physicist. In general, those scientists who have taken UFOs seriously have tended to keep the alien abduction accounts at arm’s length, while those who take alien abductions at face value see little reason to analyse mere lights in the sky.
McDonald’s view on UFOs was based, he said, not on irrefutable evidence, but was a conclusion of last resort: all the alternative explanations seemed to him even less credible. In the middle 1960s I arranged for McDonald to present his best cases in a private