UFO Curious

Sixty years ago, on a lonely stretch of highway between Montreal, Canada and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill got abducted by aliens. They were driving home from their belated honeymoon.

Words by Anna Hutchcroft.

A loving couple and passionate advocates for the civil rights movement, Betty and Barney were well-respected citizens. Betty was a social worker and Barney was a postman. On paper, they were unlikely candidates to fabricate an abduction story. And they weren’t lying. 

Some argue that it was the pressure of their jobs that caused them to hallucinate – with Barney driving more than 90 kilometres each day for work and Betty tending to 120 child welfare cases at a time. Some point to the stress of their relationship – the fact that Betty was white and Barney was black wasn’t insignificant at that time in the US. It was only six years before the US Supreme Court overturned state laws banning mixed-race marriage. They weren’t crazy either – the psychiatrist who first received their news vouched for their sanity (even as he stopped short of corroborating their abduction story). 

Since their story went public in 1966, millions of people have claimed the experience of alien abduction. Unbeknownst to Betty and Barney Hill, their tale has become the blueprint for a growing myth of alien abduction that has cemented itself into the collective zeitgeist. UFO abduction support groups like The Brisbane UFO Meetup Group, UFO & Paranormal Research Society of Australia (UFO-PRSA), and the US-based international Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, have since sprung up. Tales of being kidnapped by extraterrestrials generally emerge from western countries. To date, there is only one man in China, a lumberjack, who has reportedly seen – and slept with – an alien. Notably, China has just built the largest radio dish in the world – an elaborate eavesdropping effort, custom-built to listen for signs of extraterrestrials. For whatever reason, however, it seems not to be encouraging a larger number of abductions. 

Abductees today prefer the title “experiencers”. Of all the police officers, professors, lumberjacks, psychotherapists, scientists, shopkeepers, stay-at-home moms and students that comprise the diverse demographic of experiencers, most cite the same symptoms as proof: amnesia, paralysis and unaccounted-for bruises. When interviewed and studied, experiencers have all been proven to have other things in common, too: vivid imaginations and a high susceptibility to suggestion. 

Alien abduction stories may help us come to terms with our existential questions about where we come from. Without the story of alien abduction to help create meaning out of these disjointed-feeling phenomena, the weight of misunderstood experience persists. When stories are understood and assigned meaning, they feel less traumatic. Susan Clancy interviewed and evaluated experiencers of all demographics and listened to their stories, writing a book about it called, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. She argues that alien abductions satisfy an innate human desire to feel unique. “An alien abduction story helps people disposed to believe in such things make sense of an unexplained circumstance, like a few lost hours, sudden bruises, or a generalized feeling of anxiety. It can also help make sense of life. Being chosen by visitors from beyond gives the abductee a feeling of specialness, of being a little less insignificant in a big, cold universe.” 

Last year, amidst the mass-anxiety in the early months of the pandemic, the National UFO Reporting Center in Washington reported a 200 per cent increase in unidentified flying object sightings in Canada, Belgium and the United States. Far from ringing the alarm bells for an alien invasion, UFO researchers who call themselves ufologists (pronounced “yoof-ologists’’), chalk it up to lonely people in lockdown looking up at the sky. Statistically, most sightings are just a misidentification of aircrafts’ lights. With international travel at a standstill, however, most commercial jets could not be the culprits. It would be quite a strange collateral outcome if Covid were to lead us to the discovery of extraterrestrial life. But both do deal with scientific, cultural, economic and political impacts. And both indiscriminately affect every human on earth, while instigating the need for increased human collaboration. When dealing with the virus, it feels as if we’re making it up as we go along – as presumably we would be with alien contact, too. And so who is making the decisions? 

The US military examined 144 incidents from the past two decades in the first-of-its-kind report to Congress released 25 June 2021. Some UFOs (dubbed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP, by the CIA) were captured on film, including three videos that the Pentagon declassified last year. In a section of the report, entitled A Handful of UAP Appear to Demonstrate Advanced Technology, observers reported seeing aircraft move in an unfamiliar way. “Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, manoeuvre abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.” Ever since weather balloon debris was found in Roswell, New Mexico, there have been believers alleging that the government covered up evidence of intergalactic visitations. Almost as if in response, discussion of UFOs has been dismissed as belonging to the realm of conspiracy theorists – with some universities going so far as to fire professors seen to be too outspoken in their curiosity about ET. With the release of the report last June, the US Government is now willing to admit that there indeed have been some strange things happening in its airspace. Prior to this, and despite men and women in the US Navy and Air Force reporting encounters with advanced-seeming unidentified aircrafts, anyone who looked at the sky and cried “aliens!” was likely to be mocked. 

Sarah Scoles, author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, points out that “UFO belief and interest tends to ebb and flow with the cultural and existential tide of dread, so when bad things are going on, people do tend to turn to the skies more often in search of something powerful, something distracting, or even a different kind of threat.” Recent YouGov research shows that more than one in two people in the UK, Germany and the US believe there is extraterrestrial intelligent life, with 2.5 per cent of the US population having reported personal experience with alien abduction. According to a study by Chapman University, more than two in five Americans believe that aliens have visited earth in our ancient past. One-in-three believes aliens are now visiting Planet Earth. Perhaps it’s easier to contend with the possibility of alien invasion than accept more invisible and ambiguous viral invasions playing out on our terrestrial and bodily battlegrounds.

Whether you’re an experiencer, an ufologist, or a perpetual skeptic, the stories we tell ourselves about space help us understand our place in the universe. As Carl Sagan pointed out in his book The Cosmic Question, “space exploration leads directly to religious and philosophical questions.” 

Seeing our Earth as aliens might see it requires us to journey into space. And depending on how far away we are, different distances yield different perspectives – some being more comforting than others. When they landed on the moon, Apollo astronauts saw the earth as this tiny ball of life floating in opaque blackness. “That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man,” wrote James B. Irwin, one of the American astronauts.

Another image, by contrast, emphasised the insignificance of us earthlings. When the image of the Pale Blue Dot was snapped from 6,437,376,000 kilometres away some 30 years later by the Voyager 1, earth appeared as a barely-perceptible (less than 0.12 pixels-large) fleck of dust in a scattering of light waves caused by the sun. After all the beautiful, romantic, tender representations of our beloved earth taken by astronauts and satellites, this image taken by Voyager 1 lands in a different way. Unlike the Apollo photographs, Earth is no longer at the centre of the frame. You have to squint to see it and all that surrounds it is cold, featureless vastness. 

The photograph came at Carl Sagan’s request and it was one of the last photos that The Voyager took before shutting off its cameras to conserve energy, travelling into infinitude. To be able to gaze upon our home from such an extraordinary distance allows us a deep change of perspective. Sagan went on to describe this paradigm shift in his speech, Pale Blue Dot:

Consider that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

For all the grand philosophising, the Voyager mission has some characteristically human myopia attached to it as well. The $1.1 billion space probe is currently travelling at about 56,000 kilometres per hour. At this rate, it’ll take about 40,000 years for it to exit our solar system. It’ll take 80,000 years to get to our closest star, Proxima Centauri. It was sent out into infinite space to have a poke around and to see what exists beyond our neighbourhood. But for Carl Sagan, his wife Ann Druyan, and the other NASA scientists who spearheaded this project, the Voyager was a bid to make contact with the ultimate Other – our extraterrestrial counterparts, on some distant planet floating in space. The Voyager was deployed with a message from us to them, telling our story in pictures, diagrams, speeches and songs, all embedded onto a none other than a golden record – a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk that was created to be our galactic ambassador even after our planet is reduced to ash by an exploding sun. A record that says, according to Druyan, “we want to be citizens of the cosmos. We want you to know about us.” And truly, it may reveal more about us than we intended it to.

Unfortunately, we’re not very good at looking beyond ourselves when imagining Others. When attempting to answer the question of whether we’re alone in the universe, we tend to look for planets with liquid water, similar to our own – planets in what scientists call the “Goldilocks Zone” – not too close or too far from the stars they orbit. We look for carbon-based life. We look for bipedal, binocular, ten-fingered, hearing, sensing humanoids whose technological advancements include radio signals that we might one day detect from our telescopes on earth. The golden record, designed to exist a million years in a (currently) 14 billion-year-old universe, is hoped to land in the hands, and perhaps ears, of intelligent life. It has greetings in the 55 most widely spoken human languages across time (and one in the non-human language of whales), Bach, Mozart, Javanese gamelan music, a Peruvian wedding song, sounds of a mother speaking her first words to her baby, and dozens of other snippets of Life on Earth as the scientists elected to represent them. With these chosen symbols, we hope to find affinity in our great sparse universe. We hope to find common ground. Perhaps we hope to find ourselves.

So what happened to Betty and Barney Hill? As recounted in their book, The Interrupted Journey, co-written with John G. Fuller, they woke up in their bed the morning after they were abducted and didn’t remember anything. They couldn’t remember driving through the White Mountains, mesmerised by a bright light in the sky that appeared to be following them. They couldn’t recall the light growing so bright that they couldn’t dismiss it as a star or a satellite, or Barney pulling over to get a good look at it through his binoculars. They didn’t remember seeing something “as big as a jet but as flat as a pancake,” with windows through which you could see “at least half a dozen living beings in uniform” spinning just 100 feet overhead. They don’t remember being distressed, or getting back in their car to begin speeding home, or reaching Route 3 in Lincoln, New Hampshire, two hours from their house and hearing a series of beeps or feeling “an odd tingling drowsiness” followed by “a sort of haze.” The next day, all they knew was they had scuffed shoes, Betty a torn dress, Barney a snapped binocular strap. And neither of their watches functioned anymore. They felt a growing sense of unease that manifested in two years of unsettling dreams and anxiety. Eventually, they went to see a psychiatrist. Over the course of months of hypnosis, the Hills began to pull together memories that explained what happened to them that night. A UFO landed on their car and little grey beings with large heads and eyes led them up a long ramp into their spacecraft where they were poked and prodded on a metal table for alien science.

Presuming we do find extraterrestrial life similar to our own, what would it mean? The short and simple answer is that it won’t be easy to interpret the meaning. Nor would it be the same for everyone. NASA might want to investigate the mechanics of alien spacecraft. The military would want to understand their weapons or propulsion technologies. Physicists might want to know about the discoveries that enabled aliens to travel safely at the speed of light. Anthropologists might be curious about the extraterrestrials’ core values and cultural modes of conduct. Religious leaders may preach about the inferiority of extraterrestrial morals, at least until reassured that their current doctrines are not under threat. Politicians might worry about their presence instigating social chaos, financial disruption, or the dissolution of national borders. 

The physicist Paul Davies, who won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, wrote: “The discovery of life beyond Earth would transform not only our science but also our religions, or belief systems and our entire world view. For in a sense, the search for extraterrestrial life is really a search for ourselves – who we are and what our place is in the grand sweep of the cosmos.”

But if the day comes when we do actually cross paths with our Venutian counterparts, perhaps we still wouldn’t know what we’re doing. Our existential questions, perhaps, are destined to remain unanswered forever. And perhaps it’s exactly this mystery that is at the core of our humanity. Along with our desire to unveil it.