This Day, But Not In History 9/19

On September 19, 1961 while heading home from Canada through the mountains of New Hampshire, Betty and Barney Hill claimed they were abducted by a UFO.

Did it really happen? Well, remember how a lawyer got Kris Kringle out of the loony bin with the connivance of postal employees in Miracle on 34th Street? You could make a similar case here. The Hills are the only alien abductees with an official state road sign marking the spot where the UFO picked them up.

Yes, the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources erected marker number 224 on the site in 2011.

“To tell you the truth, we were very excited about the prospect,” Elizabeth Muzzey, director of the agency, informed a HuffPost writer.

“We thought about the 1950s and ’60s in our country when there was such widespread interest in things such as space travel and space exploration. And in all the years since, there have been a great number of people who have asked whether other forms of life may exist out there in the solar system and beyond,” she said.

“Certainly, the experience of the Hills falls right at the center of that cultural and scientific experience,” Muzzey added. “So that’s what we are presenting in the marker — that this was the first widely reported UFO abduction report in the U.S., and a ton have since followed.”

The text on the marker reads:

r-HILL-HISTORICAL-MARKER-large570

Betty and Barney Hill Incident

On the night of September 19-20, 1961, Portsmouth, NH couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two hours of “lost” time while driving north on Rte 1 near Lincoln. They filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report of a brightly-lit cigar-shaped craft the next day, but were not public with their story until it was leaked in the Boston Traveler in 1965. This was the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States.

This happened in the psychedelic Sixties, which may explain why the Hills had no trouble remaining politically active after their alleged abduction. Betty and Barney — who once was appointed by the governor of New Hampshire to serve on the state advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission — campaigned for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. President Johnson won by a landslide and the couple was invited to his 1965 inauguration.

6 thoughts on “This Day, But Not In History 9/19

  1. Oy.

    1. It’s not terribly difficult to obtain an historical roadside marker in NH. I’m intimately familiar with the process. It merely requires an historical event, reliable documentation of the event, filling out the application, getting signatures on a petition and – waiting a minimum of 30 years to go by.

    2. No. The Hills were not abducted by aliens. I have ‘information’ that discredits this story. However, neither I nor my family wants to get involved in the brouhaha that would result from publishing it, so instead we merely sigh, shake our heads and move on whenever this subject comes up.

    3. No. We are not going down some twisted Ray Palmer path with Amazing. UFOs stuff does not equal SF…and neither do ghosts, Moon NAZI conspiracies, chemtrails…the Illuminati….and the Frozen Heads of Kennedy and Elvis are NOT hanging out with reanimated Marilyn in the Jungle Room – much as we might wish they were.

    Having checked…there is no specific prohibition against erecting a roadside marker commemorating fake historical events…..

  2. I remember a Tv movie about the Hills featuring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons that assumes that at the very least, they honestly believed they had an alien emcounter
    Well-acted movie, although not too factual.

  3. Some years ago, Jim MacDonald argued in “Making Light” that the Hills had a stress/fatigue-induced blackout and mistook a local feature for a UFO. (I’m not finding a search function in http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight, so no reference — sorry….) IIRC, he blamed the beacon on a building on top of Cannon Mountain, near where the Old Man of the Mountain used to be. He lives in and travels northerly NH (as an EMT, IIRC), so he was able to argue the case quite plausibly, including evidence that usually gets left out of the story.

  4. I think an historical marker is warranted, and the careful wording on the marker suggests why I may be correct. It is a fact that the Hills made their claim, and it is also a fact that their story (once made public) became famous, even inspirational to many other people. I think Cosmos reenacted it, and that show was seen by millions of people. It is a fact that the UFO craze was big business for decades, and probably was the primary impetus OMNI magazine.

    So I say, this day in history. People see the darnedest things.

  5. If there is nothing prohibiting historical markers whether the reality or not, then I suggest that work begin immediately to place markers at the locations of The Tucker Hotel and the first Tower of Bheer Cans to the Moon.

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