Kevin D. Randle
Roswell, UFOs and the Unusual
Alien Abductions
The Hill Abduction — 1961
I am going to assume here that the readers have a solid knowledge of the Barney and Betty Hill abduction case and not go over that material again. Many others have provided what they believe to be the corroboration of the case and laid that out in detail in various works including a couple of books. I will look at it from a skeptical position (though some will say a “Debunker” position) and provide the contrary evidence. While I believe that the Hill case can be resolved in terrestrial terms, this does not mean that every case of alien abduction can be resolved in this fashion nor that we can easily explain all those cases in the same way.
First, we learn that the Hills arrived home much later than they believed they should have. They had calculated the time it would be necessary for them to get home and found that time was missing. This is probably a result of their repeated stops to observe what they believed to be a UFO and driving at less than the posted speed as they watched the UFO and as they discussed the sighting.
I freely admit that this is an assumption on my part and is of little real importance in the case. It does explain the period of missing time in mundane terms, however. It gives us a sense of what might have happened that night.
More important to the case, and something that is viewed as a corroboration of the tale, is the star map that Betty Hill was shown by the leader of the alien group. This piece of circumstantial evidence has impressed many people. It is a piece of evidence that was borne of the Betty Hill abduction and which points to a home world of at least some of the alien creatures who many believe are abducting people. If it is accurate, then it provides some solid evidence about the abduction. Let's look at this evidence and see if it is as persuasive as it seems.
Betty, during one of the hypnotic regression sessions with Dr. Simon, claimed she had seen a star map while on board the alien craft. According to John Fuller, author of The Interrupted Journey, Betty kept precise notes of her dreams, writing them down while the details were fresh in her mind. It was during one of the dreams that she remembered the star map and wrote down what she remembered. These notes, according to Fuller, are very similar to the hypnotically regressed testimony recovered by Dr. Simon.
According to the notes, as published by Fuller and later by Jerry [Jerome] Clark in volume one of his The UFO Encyclopedia, Betty"…asked where he [the leader of the alien crew] was from, and he asked if I knew anything about the universe. I said no, but I would like to learn. He went over to the wall and pulled down a map, strange to me. Now I would believe this to be a sky map. It was a map of the heavens, with numerous sized stars and planets, some large, some only pinpoints. Between many of these, lines were drawn, some broken lines, some light solid lines, some heavy black lines. They were not straight, but curved. Some went from one planet to another, to another, in a series of lines. Others had no lines, and he said the lines were expeditions. He asked me where the earth was on this map, and I admitted that I had no idea. He became slightly sarcastic and said that if I did not know where the earth was, it was impossible to show me where he was from; he snapped the map back into place."
Simon had suggested that Betty draw the star map when she first mentioned it to him but she was reluctant to do so, afraid that her poor artistic skills would not allow a proper duplicate. Simon then suggested that she should draw the map when she felt ready to do so. Not long after the session, she produced a map with twelve points on it showing the connections among the stars. The solid lines were for trade routes and the broken, or dotted lines, were expeditionary routes. Fuller published the map in The Interrupted Journey.
In April 1965, The New York Timesprinted a map of the constellation Pegasus because Russian astronomers had found what they believed to be an artificial radio source near it. Betty Hill, seeing the map, was surprised by how closely it resembled the star map she had seen. She even applied the star names from the Times map to her sketch suggesting that the alien creatures home star was either Homan or Baham. This map, of course, did not show our sun on it.
Marjorie Fish, a third grade teacher and amateur astronomer from Ohio and later a research assistant at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, became intrigued with the Hill star map (I mention these things only to provide a little background for Fish, not to suggest that her work was not an impressive bit of scientific study). Fish believed that she could figure out the map and learn which star was the home to the aliens.
There were few clues for her other than what Betty Hill told her during her interviews with Hill. She assumed one of the stars that was connected to the others with lines belonged to our sun. She assumed that the map represented our section of the galaxy, that they would be interested in stars of the same types as our sun, the travel patterns should make some sense and the travel patterns would avoid the largest stars and those that are not on the main sequence (that is, stars that are basically stable for long periods of time and like our sun).
Fish built a number of three dimensional representations of the our section of the galaxy and then viewed them from different angles, searching for the Betty Hill pattern. Eventually she found one with the stars, Zeti 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli as the base (which, apropos of nothing at all, is the system where those on the Nostromo found the creature in Alien). They are separated by "light weeks" rather than light years, but are far enough apart that planetary orbits would be stable and life could evolve on those planets. There are suggestions that the triple star system centered around Alpha Centauri could have planets orbiting these stars because of the distances among them.
But others were also searching for the pattern. Charles W. Atterberg found a pattern that had Epsilon Eridani and Epsilon Indi as the base stars. It too fits with the Betty Hill map, and two of the stars on it Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani were targets by Project Ozma, one of the first of the SETI searches. In other words, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence believed that two of the stars in the Atterberg interpretation were likely candidates for planetary systems and intelligent life. Tau Ceti was also one of the candidates on the Fish map.
Suddenly we have three published interpretations of the Betty Hill's star map, all of which made sense to many. But Marjorie Fish disagreed. Of the Atterberg interpretation, she noted that he had included some red dwarfs as stars visited by the aliens. She said that she had ruled out red dwarfs because there are so many of them and if she used red dwarfs in a logical construction, then all the lines were used before she reached Earth. She had assumed that the sun would be one of the stars connected to the others on the map although the "leader" of the alien crew had provided no indication that this was true.
She also assumed that if they, the aliens, were interested in red dwarfs, that is, that they visited some, then there should have been lines connecting other red dwarfs but there were not. Her assumption was that one red dwarf would be as interesting to a space faring race as the next. But it could be that some red dwarfs were more interesting because of things we cannot see. Because we can detect no difference between one red dwarf and another doesn't mean that there aren't differences.
She makes other, similar assumptions, in her rejection of Atterberg's model. She notes that a number of relatively close double stars such as 61 Cygni, Struve 2398, Groombridge 34 and Kruger 60 are part of Atterberg's pattern but that there is no line to Alpha Centauri. Once again, she assumes that the alien race would be visiting Alpha Centauri if there were visiting the other double star systems and once again we can point out that there might be something of great interest in the systems visited but not in the one that is by-passed. It should also be noted that according to some astronomy texts, Alpha Centauri is a triple star system and that might be the reason for exclusion by the aliens. It is unlikely that a triple star would have any planetary systems but certainly not impossible. All this is, of course, guess work.