A two-stage psychological model that explains alien abduction stories
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The first alien abduction case to really grab the public’s attention was that of Betty and Barney Hill. On the night of September 19, 1961, the Hills were driving back from a short holiday in Canada to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when, at around 10:30 p.m., Betty spotted a bright light near the moon. When it appeared to get bigger and brighter, they stopped the car and observed the light through binoculars. Betty thought she saw a huge, oddly shaped craft that might be a UFO. Barney initially thought that it was an aircraft. However, he quickly changed his mind.
A little farther into their journey, they stopped again, and Barney got out of the car to observe the craft through the binoculars. He walked toward the craft until he was only 50 feet from it as it hovered at about tree height. He later reported that he saw a huge, pancake-shaped craft with a row of windows behind which were at least a dozen occupants in dark, Nazi-like uniforms. Barney panicked, got back into the car, and drove home.
The Hills heard two sets of beeping sounds that appeared to cause their car to vibrate as they drove home, eventually arriving home in daylight at 5:15 a.m. The last 200 miles of their journey had taken seven hours, much longer than it should have done. They did recall leaving the highway onto a dirt road and coming across a roadblock of some kind, as well as seeing some sort of glowing orb. When he arrived at home, Barney noticed that his shoes had scuff marks and the leather strap on his binoculars was torn. He felt an urge to examine his groin in the bathroom but noted nothing unusual upon doing so. Betty noticed an odd pink powder on her torn dress. They found strange polished patches on their car that seemed to affect a compass needle. They also found that they could recall very little of what had happened between hearing the first set of beeping sounds and the second.
Ten days later, Betty began having a series of dreams, lasting over five nights, that seemed to fill in some of the gaps in memory. In her dreams, she and Barney were stopped by a group of humanoids at the roadblock and then taken aboard the alien vessel. The aliens were about five feet tall with large eyes, mouths like thin slits, and no protruding ears. They communicated via a mixture of telepathy and broken English. Similar aliens, now often simply referred to as greys, were described in many subsequent reports of alien abduction.
On board the craft, the Hills were separated and each was medically examined. This involved the collection of skin, nail, and hair samples and, in Betty’s case, the insertion of a long needle into her navel, causing excruciating pain. Also, Betty was shown a star map allegedly showing the major trade routes used by the aliens.
A few months later, Barney was referred for psychiatric treatment. He was suffering from stress and exhaustion and had developed a ring of warts around his groin. After one year of treatment, he requested to undergo hypnotic regression in the hope that this would reveal what had really happened on that fateful journey from Canada to New Hampshire. He had his first hypnotic regression session with Dr. Benjamin Simon in December 1963, and not long after that Dr. Simon also hypnotically regressed Betty.
Content retrieved from: https://bigthink.com/the-past/a-two-stage-psychological-model-for-explaining-alien-abduction-stories/.
