A meeting with Betty Hill
On April the 13th 1987 I met Betty Hill in her house on 953 State Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Together with me was my wife Anneli Åstebro, fellow journalist Rolf Nilsén [RN] and photographer Pär Bäckström [PB] who travelled with me during a vacation in the US. What she revealed to us then has been a topic of great interest for many UFOlogists. Here is the full story.
By Clas Svahn
I had called Betty Hill from New York and she agreed to meet with us a couple of days later. We spent a full afternoon together with her and she came out as a very nice, positive and agreable lady who told us her now famous story about her and her husband Barney’s alleged abduction without digressing from her original story.
We had a cake and she showed us many pictures of, what she thought, was UFOs that she had photographed in later days. Many of them were easily identified as mundane objects, a few others not so easy to understand the origin of. It was clear that Betty Hll thought that she still could se UFOs just by going to certain places and wait for them.
During our interview Betty Hill suddenly told us about an event taking place a couple of years before the abduction. An event neither of us had heard of before. She told it without hesitation and apparently she believed in it. She never mentioned a year but it sounded like the event had happened in the very last years of the 50’s.
My own reaction at the time, and conclusion now, is that what she told us was something that had happened to her.
Here follows a transcript of our conversation starting 32 minutes and 13 seconds into my nearly four hour long taped interview. It is 3 minutes and 51 seconds long. The clip starts at the end of a conversation about the abduction experience but soon turns into Betty telling about some strange pieces from an unknown craft.
CS: Do you think that they had had you under supervision a couple of days maybe in advance before they took you inte the ship? Or do you think that it was pure…
BH: Coincidence?
CS: …coincidence that you were taken aboard?
BH: I think so. Though I couldn’t think of a better person for them to do it to.
CS: Because you are white and your man is black? And that would be something for them to examine?
BH: Yes.
RN: So maybe you were studied by them a few days before?
BH: That I don’t know. They could have sat here [unintelligable].
RN: They could have picked you out.
BH: Wait a minute. Let me tell you something that happened. A few years ago before this happened, this was in the 50’s, I was over here in Maine visiting with the family. It was a warm night, we were sitting outdoors on the porch. When we saw what we thought at that time was a plane, very slowly going across the sky. And while we were watching it, it exploded in mid air and burned up.
Now, listen. You know. We have seen a plane blow up. We turned on the radio, we turned on the TV. Nothing. Wow! Up by my mother’s, my nephew had seen this burning debris come down from the sky and he watched it and when it cooled off he got some of that, and my sister gave som pieces to me and said, we do don’t know what it is, maybe I had some friends at the university, maybe we could get someone to analyze it.
So, I had all these pieces and I had them in the closet there (pointing) on the top shelf. And, you know, I didn’t find anybody to analyze it. So just before, about four days before we left for to go on the trip Barney said: What we have the stuff on the top shelf? Why not just throw it away, we could use the shelf. I was having some fill put in the backyard, so I took the pieces and I throw them in the backyard and when they dumped the sand they covered them. About three days later we go on the trip.
And, when I saw the craft, it was just like the one I saw explode.
CS: So maybe it is a connection there?
BH: Is there a connection? Somehow they know that I have the pieces. Or maybe they interpreted that I had an interest of something. I don’t know.
PB: Do you think the pieces were still there when you came back?
BH: No, because a whole big truck load of sand…
CS: So they are down there.
BH: Yeah. And then afterwards I said, why didn’t I keep them? But you know when you can’t explain something, get rid of that. Get it out of your life, it doesn’t exist.
CS: It is not a very good idea!
BH: [Laughs] So that, you know,… but at the time I saw that… I thought it was a plane. But then later after I saw the UFO I said, planes don’t have windows with the same shape as that.
This is the end of our conversation regarding this part of her story. Thinking back there are several questions I should have asked but never did:
What did the pieces look like?
What material were they made of?
Were they light or heavy?
Were exactly in the garden did she put them?
Who were the other witnesses?
But we left this topic because Betty Hill had many other things to tell us.
What is clear is that Betty Hill did throw some pieces that she thought came from an unknown craft out from her closet and into the garder just days before the encounter at Indian Head on September 19th 1961.
And that Betty Hill had the observation from the porch in Maine clear in her mind when she compared what she first saw from the car 1961 with what she had seen a couple of years earlier.
(I published this story in UFO-Sweden’s magazine UFO-Aktuellt number 3, 1990, for the first time).