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As we’ve seen in Incident at Exeter and Lightcraft II: Significance (and hopefully you’re following the links in order), UFO reports were becoming disturbingly believable in 1965. Too many people were seeing them at night. There was something solid behind those strange lights. Thanks to Exeter and the evolving flap over the Midwest, an unexplained sequence of lights closing in on a lonely rural road at night, with possible intent on the unwary, became the moody image of the UFO experience.
At this same time, another incident was involving before the public. It fit the scenario above and had come years before this great flap— i.e. years before any opportunistic grandstanding. Because it became famous now, during the Second Great UFO Flap in history (1965-1967), UFO believers declared it had been caused by the same UFOs now sweeping the nation. As a result, this incident would give us the image to the occupants of those mysterious lights in the night sky and their motive for hanging in the rural solitude.
I am neither yea nor nay aliens as little gray insectoids. The purpose here is to establish whether this alien image has any validity in any objective evidence. After all, that’s what I’m sharing here on The Quester Files. We are following the juncture that brought us to where we are today in the “UFO Experience.” The juncture is 1965 and the Second Great Flap. The path from it leads us through New Hampshire, the Midwest, and on until today.
The image of the little gray alien was introduced into our culture, to quote Benjamin Franklin on another matter, “like a bastard child; half improvise and half compromise.” It straddles the line  between objective and subjective. This image came to us via the Betty and Barney Hill case. Objectively, Betty and Barney were eyewitness to a UFO on lonely Route 3 in New Hampshire on the night of September 19/20, 1961. With binoculars, Barney was witness to occupants behind a long window, each pane delineated by thin struts. They reported their encounter to Pease AFB and then to NICAP, and mention of seeing the occupants even finds its way into an early 1962 issue of The UFO Investigator, the newsletter of the esteemed civilian saucer watch group based in Washington D.C. and headed by arch conservative UFOlogist Major Donald E. Keyhoe.
Betty and Barney Hill and their dog Delsey.
The subjective factor within the case came years later on February 22 and April 5, 1964, during hypnosis sessions with Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon. Under hypnosis, Barney described the people behind the saucer’s long bank of windows. One was tending some console and looked over his shoulder. Barney considered him friendly. But then he noticed the one he called the “leader.” He stood proud before the window and stared. Barney didn’t like him. He called him a Nazi. He wore a black military hat (Gestapo) and a black scarf around his neck. Still under hypnosis he drew a sketch (below left). Then on April 5, 1964, Dr. Simon records in his notes:
The first interview with Mr. Hill was now played back to Mr. and Mrs.
Hill together and carried to the point of the sighting and the outburst of
extreme anxiety that Mr. Hill had. He showed considerable distress at
this, but seemed to manage it quite well. And as it proceeded, he took out
a piece of paper and began to draw. In this drawing, he sketched out
again a head, with some very staring eyes, of almond shape, but not slanted.
The sketch, below, right, is the sketch referred to above. It is a refinement of the earlier sketch (left). Later, a sculptor put it into 3 dimensions for them (bottom).
 
Unfortunately, this image comes and does not come from hypnosis. The first comes from hypnosis, and Barney obviously didn’t regard it as accurate. The second he regarded as more accurate as to what he objectively saw the night of September 20, 1961. Nevertheless, he wanted assurance from Dr. Simon that this was fantasy. The careful head shrinker remained uncommitted.
If only Barney had reported the details of the occupants in 1961, the description could be regarded as more objective, along the lines of an eyewitness to a suspect in a crime. The drawing can then take the place of a composite or sketch of a perpetrator. This is not the case.
Barney didn’t want to talk about the figures when they made their report to the Air Force. When on September 26, 1961, only 5 days after the incident, Betty writes to Donald Keyhoe and NICAP she only declares: “As it glided closer he was able to see inside this object, but not too closely. He did see several figures scurrying about as though they were making some hurried type of preparation. One figure was observing us from the windows. From the distance, this was seen, the figures appeared to be about the size of a pencil [held at arm’s length], and seemed to be dressed in some type of shiny black uniform. . . . At this point, my husband became shocked and got back in the car, in a hysterical condition, laughing and repeating that they were going to capture us. He started driving the car— the motor had been left running. As we started to move, we heard several buzzing or beeping sounds which seemed to be striking the trunk of our car.”
Obviously, the objective part of their story is preserved very early on, but as to what the figures looked like hinges only on Barney. How much Betty could even get out of him, we don’t know. For she later writes: “At this time we are searching for any clue that might be helpful to my husband, in recalling whatever it was he saw that caused him to panic. His mind has completely blacked out at this point. Every attempt to recall leaves him very frightened. This flying object was at least as large as a four-motor plane, its flight was noiseless and the lighting of the interior did not reflect on the ground.”
We can infer, infer only, from the above context, which was in place 5 days after the incident, that it was a non human appearance of the figures he saw that so frightened Barney.
Betty’s nightmares or vivid dreams were not yet developed when she wrote to Keyhoe. They would begin about 5 days later (so 10 days after their UFO sighting). These dreams covered the time after seeing the UFO. She saw through the forest of trees the “moon” on the ground (a bright glowing circle). Then shortly thereafter she and Barney encountered men who stopped them on the road and forced them out of their car. They led them into a disc (the moon). She wrote in her notes (made in late November 1961) what the perps looked like. We get the first detailed description of the aliens from these notes.
During this time I become conscious of several things [She is referring to her dream, as all through this account]. First, only one man speaks, in English, with a foreign accent, but very understandably. The others say nothing. I note their physical appearance. Most of the men are my height, although I cannot remember the height of the heels on my shoes. None is as tall as Barney, so I would judge them to be 5' to 5' 4". Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger (longer) than the average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs— like Jimmy Durante’s.
Their complexions were of a gray tone; like a gray paint with a black base; their lips were of a bluish tint. Hair and eyes were very dark, possibly black.
The men were all dressed alike, presumably in uniform, of a light navy blue color with a gray shade in it. They wore trousers and short jackets, that gave the appearance of zippered sports jackets, but I am not aware of zippers or buttons for closing. Shoes were a low, slip-on style, resembling a boot. I cannot remember any jewelry, or insignia.
They were all wearing military caps, similar to Air Force, but not so broad on the top. They were very human in their appearance, not frightening. They seemed to be very relaxed, friendly in a professional way (business-like). There was no haste, no waste of time.
This is hardly the same thing that Barney presents to us while straddling the line of hypnosis. The only similarity is that Barney put a military hat on the alien while under hypnosis. Free of hypnosis, he omits the jaunty military headgear in his next sketch.
Contemporarily, what we do know is the description of the saucer. It was large, over 100 feet, with  a long row of windows along the edge of the disc. A blue-white light shone forth from the windows.
Barney showing his sketch of what the saucer looked like. It tilted downward so those at the window could watch him.
The general details follow. Along this desolate Route 3, Betty and Barney were traveling back south from Canada to their home in Portsmouth. Route 3 is a two lane road. At night it is often quite deserted. There are little towns, motels, and a couple of tourist attractions. While traveling south, they noticed the bright light to the west (their right). They stopped more than once to use binoculars to try and get a better view of it. They also let their dog Delsey wander about. Betty believed in flying saucers, but Barney really didn’t have a stance. This was a strange light, and Betty was getting excited. But Barney didn’t like it. He was high-strung at the best of times.
As they drove along the road, Betty continued to try and get views of this strange light. It was as if the light was pacing them. It gave Barney a haunted feeling. Finally, Barney saw a wigwam. It was a tourist site for selling souvenirs near Indian Head, a large distinctive mountain near Man of the Mountain, the symbol of New Hampshire. The UFO was closing in. He got out and got the binoculars, and walked across the road into a field. Since he stopped the car in the center of the road, Betty remained behind to look for traffic. She estimated he was gone 4 or 5 minutes.
During this time Barney was busy looking through the binoculars and trying to make out the figures. Their silhouettes were carved in the blue-white light shining out from the craft’s windows. The pancake shaped craft tilted downward, so that it was easy for Barney to see in, and for those inside to look out. Red lights were on  the sides of the pancake/saucer and now they started to project outward. They were on the ends of some kind of rods or flaps/wings that were slowly extending from the sides. Barney felt the craft, now hovering ahead off to the side of the road, was going to land.
Artist’s concept of the Hill flying saucer.
Barney came running back to the car, threw the binoculars in and cried to Betty they had to get out of here. “They” were coming to “capture” them! He shifted and sped off. Betty stuck her upper body out of the passenger window trying to see it, but now she couldn’t anymore. A few moments later they both heard strange electronic beeping. They heard a burst of this beeping again, and shortly after that they saw a road sign indicating Concord was 17 miles distant. They could not possibly understand how they got that far. Over the next couple of months they tried to figure out their encounter with the help of a few others. They couldn’t get around the time discrepancy. It had taken them much longer to get home than was normal. The time frame between when they had left Canada and returned to Portsmouth indicated they lost time— a couple of hours!
Although they had reported their UFO encounter to the Air Force, they didn’t mention the occupants. For the UFO groups, their story went into the annals of UFOlogy as merely another very good account of sighting occupants. Then it faded away.
After they became aware of the lost time, it had nagged at them. And Betty had those vivid or strange dreams. They returned more than once to the area of Route 3 where they had their sighting. Yet it wasn’t the location where the men had kidnapped them. Another woodsy location was stained in their memory— that area where they saw through the trees the moon sitting on the ground. They drove around trying to find this location, but couldn’t. At last, the years took their toll. With Barney under much stress and Betty’s dreams returning, they decided to sort this out with a psychiatrist in Boston, the respected Dr. Benjamin Simon. During these hypnosis sessions, the details of the sightings emerged and the lost time was accounted for— they had come across men standing on the road in front of them. They had been abducted by the occupants of the flying saucer and experimented upon! The beeping had signaled the aliens putting them in hypnosis so they would forget their encounter. Then the beeping had brought them out of it two hours later and this is why the first clear memory after their Route 3 UFO sighting was the road sign “Concord 17 miles.”
Simon didn’t believe it. He believed this episode came from Betty’s nightmares and that Barney had heard enough of them to be influenced in his hypnotic recall. He believed some form of objective event had influenced them. In other words, they had seen the UFO on that night in September 1961, as they had initially reported, but the abduction was entirely from Betty’s dreams.
By 1965, reports of the Hill hypnosis sessions started to leak out along with the report there was a book deal in the works. The conservative Don Keyhoe wanted to believe the abduction was all psychological. This made it easy for him and NICAP. He could accept the UFO report, which NICAP had presented as a positive sighting in 1961, but disregard the abduction aspect of it which Keyhoe philosophically could never accept (in any abductions).
But there were those within NICAP who were not so certain. If flying saucers were here this long (since 1947), why not abductions? Starting in 1965 the reports of UFOs were becoming disturbingly clear. The landing of a strange oval object in Socorro, New Mexico, in 1964 was still unexplained, even by the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. The UFO phenomenon was coming closer and closer to home, and many conservative voices in NICAP were ready to philosophically believe abductions were the logical next step.
The Betty and Barney Hill story became famous through a Look magazine article and then the publication of John Fuller’s book The Interrupted Journey in October 1966. The case was hard to explain for a number of reasons. They were a respectable New England couple. Also, they had years before received a positive write-up for their sighting. Now, the rest which had come from hypnosis could not be easily ridiculed. After all, this was coming from two people. People don’t share the same nightmares.
Simon’s opinions really weren’t covered much in the press, nor was his skepticism over the incident reported as clearly as it should have been. The incident was left in limbo, and naturally this tended to favor the most sensational part of it. In 1975, a TV movie The UFO Incident starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty aired to great success, and it was even faithful to present Simon’s character as being skeptical and asserting the evidence existed that Barney’s recall was influenced by Betty’s accounts of her dreams.
But Simon’s opinion wasn’t that simple. He actually believed they were a rare case of dual amnesia. Then upon this, Barney was also influenced by Betty’s nightmares. In essence, it was a case of repressed memory. Proposing this happened simultaneously in two people would have been controversial, very controversial in 1966. Today, established psychiatry would instantly reject it. Repressed memory is a hot topic in that field, with the establishment highly dubious of its existence. The weightier opinion of modern psychiatry does negate Simon’s theory, thus giving us no easy explanation and leaving us with . . .? To probe into this is for another page. Here it is better to present a few intrinsic points that contradict Simon’s theory
Barney obviously wasn’t influenced by Betty in his recall of what the aliens looked like. His sketches bear no resemblance to Betty’s notes about gray men with big “shnozzolas” like Jimmy Durante. The only similarity between their accounts is he had placed a military hat on the “commander” in his sketch done under hypnosis. He later elaborated to Fuller. (After hearing his recorded sessions, memories started to return.)
The men had rather odd-shaped heads, with a large cranium, diminishing in size as it got toward the chin. And the eyes continued around to the sides of their heads, so that it appeared that they could see several degrees beyond the lateral extent of our vision. This was startling to me. And something that I remembered, after listening to the tapes, is the mouth itself. I could not describe the mouth before, and I drew the picture without including the mouth. But it was much like when you draw one horizontal line with a short perpendicular line on each end. This horizontal line would represent the lips without the muscle that we have. And it would part slightly as they made this mumumumming sound. The texture of the skin, as I remember it from this quick glance, was grayish, almost metallic looking. I didn’t notice any hair— or headgear for that matter. Also, I didn’t notice any proboscis, there just seemed to be two slits that represented the nostrils.
After hearing her hypnosis sessions, it is Betty’s image of her abductors that noticeably changed and came more in line with Barney’s.
In a sense, they looked like mongoloids, because I was comparing them with a case I had been working with, a specific mongoloid child— this sort of round face and broad forehead, along with a certain type of coarseness. The surface of their skin seemed to be a bluish gray, but probably whiter than that. Their eyes moved, and they had pupils. Somehow, I had the feeling they were more like cats’ eyes. And I couldn’t remember any buttons or zippers-but then I really didn’t want to remember.
Effectively ditching the Jimmy Durante nose, human appearance, and military hats, but keeping the gray skin and mongoloid eyes “short grays” were born and broadcast to the nation on The UFO Incident. A promo photo, right.
Pro-UFO adherents believed the story. And for them, the accuracy of Barney’s sketch (and Betty’s evolving image of the aliens) is found extrinsically by establishing that the overall incident actually happened and was not the result of Betty’s nightmares. Therefore they should also be believed in their recall of what the aliens looked like.
One researcher in particular was Marjorie Fish. She relied on one bit of extrinsic “evidence.” While aboard the saucer, Betty said she saw a star map in one of the rooms. She had drawn it for Simon while under hypnosis. The stars are connected, some by solid lines and some by dotted lines. According to Betty, the alien “leader” said  the solid lines represent regular flights and the dotted lines represent expeditionary journeys.
After the star map had been published, Fish set about to find a star system that matched. Limiting herself to the most likely inhabited solar systems, she found a near match. Coupled with what Betty said the “leader” of the aliens had told her about the meaning of solid and broken lines on the map, Fish’s work revealed the aliens came from the Zeta Reticuli system. The solid lines represented courses they flew frequently, which included to our own Sun. According to the solid lines on the map, they also flew regular flights to a few other solar systems, but only expeditionary  flights (broken lines) beyond such solar systems as Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti.
The “Leader” imparts wisdom in The UFO Experience.
Since some of the information Betty had presented in 1966 had come only in the astronomical observations of 1969, Fish’s celestial match was now promoted by proponents of the case as objective proof that Betty had actually been abducted and taken aboard the spaceship. Thus it was also extrinsic support that the image of the aliens we have from Barney was also accurate.
Barney was long dead by the mid-1970s when The UFO Experience made the case famous for all, but Betty was vociferous at UFO conventions, in TV interviews, and in movie documentaries. This was real to her, no question about it. It was real to UFO believers, and it was backed up by Betty’s star map.
Tangible, objective— this is, of course, what we are most interested in here in this section of The Quester Files. Otherwise we are just dealing with the repetitious and subjective reports of Close Encounters of the First and Second Kind.
The recollections of Betty Hill are questionable. I’m not speaking of the usual offhand debunking that condemns her hypnotic recall as (obviously) changing and based (originally) on her written notes of her nightmares. An untrained mind is at work in her recollections if these big-nosed (later mongoloid) men really were aliens.
As I write this (June 5, 2020) we are in the middle of the Covid 19 pandemic, and I suspect that most everybody is now aware of the dangers of encountering a new virus or germ with which we have no immunity. History is replete with such examples, such as when the Spaniards brought to the New World germs to which the Indians had no previous contact— thousands died in the epidemics. The same would ring true of aliens coming from another world. Even if they could handle our atmosphere, they would be in danger of contracting our diseases, and they would be in danger of contaminating us with theirs. In Betty and Barney Hill’s case, the aliens freely walk about, leave their saucer door open, and have direct contact with our atmosphere and with humans. It makes for a nice story, but it comes from an untrained mind in the biologic reality of disease contagion.
Therefore the only objective evidence we have of the occupants of this saucer is still Barney’s original report, years before the hypnosis sessions, when the “figures” were safely behind the windows of their saucer. Removing the abduction episode from their encounter doesn’t remove this image. It merely remains an image from afar, possibly what he actually saw through the binoculars. So, can it still be accurate?
There isn’t much to give us peace of mind. We have to trust to faith (literally) that Barney was able to recall accurately in the second drawing a true reflection of what he had seen objectively on the night of September 20, 1961. He didn’t want to believe it, and Simon’s notes tell us that Barney wanted his assurance this was all fantasy. However, later and now relaxed, Barney begins to elaborate in detail for John Fuller— and Simon would later complain that “Until Fuller got his hooks into it it lay fallow as a record of a successful medical study of a dual amnesia situation.”
One of the ways Fuller may have put his “hooks” into was to have cleaned-up Betty’s UFO information sources. Fuller infers it was only the respectable and conservative NICAP. After her letter to Keyhoe, Fuller writes: “As Betty Hill’s confidence increased through her study of the NICAP material, so did her willingness to reveal more of the details.” In truth, Betty had quickly delved into the fringe. Five days after their sighting she would begin to have her strange dreams in which the men with the Jimmy Durante noses waylaid their car and abducted them. This description was not unique and can be easily traced to somewhat crackpot UFOlogy.
The go-to source for what aliens might look like was Len Stringfield’s work. In 1957, he had compiled some of his C.R.I.F.O. (Civilian Research Interplanetary Flying Objects) database material, for which he was director, into Inside Saucer Post . . . 3-0 Blue. It is 94 pages of encounters, including some roadside little men encounters with an Ohio (where he was based) connection. One is dynamite and had rated mainstream news at a tabloid moment. This was the Symmonds case.
Dovetailing on the sensational case of the Kelly-Hopkinsville hobgoblin space midgets, on August 23, 1955, the Cincinnati Post reported the story (the Symmonds were from Cincinnati).
It was about 3:30 a.m., July 3, 1955. While driving to Florida for their summer vacation, Margaret Symmonds was at the wheel of their new car, and her husband, Wesley, was in the back seat sleeping. They were just south of the small backwoods town of Stockton, Georgia, on the rural route 129 (two lanes), when she saw 4 little figures in the center of road ahead. One was slouched and holding onto a stick with both hands. Two stood behind him. The one to their right now stood aside, seeing the car coming. He was the only one that moved. As she slowed to 40 mph and swerved to miss them, she was close enough to have touched them. The one that had moved threw up his arms!
A patchwork from her legal deposition gives the description of the little men.
I could see that they were wearing some kind of clothing— what appeared to be capes— grey-greenish . . . His arms looked longer than would be proportionate for the size of the body. The head looked to be of approximately normal size, only roundish. . .I had never seen anything like them before and I had never seen any clothes or material like that, either. The eyes, there were two of them, were big, like saucers, and they reflected a reddish light. I saw no pupils. I was terrified. . . .The nose was long— real long— and pointed. It reminded me of a witch. . . .The  mouth seemed small to me. I didn’t notice any lips. . . .I would say that they were all about the same size and about up to the bottom of my car window. Maybe about 3.5 or 4 feet high . . . The hands had claws on them, real long claws. I don’t know how many fingers or if one was short like a thumb. . . . His shoulders were very square and seemed unusually strong-looking for that size body.
Other stories of small men along midnight roadsides are contained in Stringfield’s book. Such small men haunted the area of Loveland and other small towns in the environs of Cincinnati. Some had strong chests. They were short, with long arms. They had gray/blue skin. His book also contains the details of the Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter of August 1955 in nearby Kentucky (the reason why the Symmonds case got published in the papers). The Kelly case and its goblins are a classic of the genre. The little critters had a thin line for a mouth, no visible nose, but huge eyes (though also big leathery ears).
The Cincinnati Post gave us this cartoon image of a Jimmy Durante small man as one of the 4 Margaret Symmonds encountered on a rural and desolate Georgia road.
With Betty’s preexisting interest in the UFO phenomenon, it is highly unlikely she did not read other sources than Keyhoe. Also, her sister Janet was quite into UFOs. “Trying to keep calm, Betty recounted the story of the night before. Janet, who had no reservations about the possibility of a UFO sighting because of her own experience, grew very excited and confirmed Betty’s growing feeling that the car or their clothes might have in some way been exposed to radiation if the object had hovered directly over the car.”
The upshot of the point here is there was enough from the readily accessible papers of UFOlogy (and possibly from her sister) to influence Betty’s dreams. These began a full 10 days after the start of her study of UFO material and 5 days after writing to Donald Keyhoe. Betty’s aliens straddled the road, were short, strong chests, had big Jimmy Durante noses and were dressed in gray outfits. She slowly came to accept Barney’s description as more accurate. He noticed no nose and only a thin line for a lip, similar to the Kelly-Hopkinsville goblins. Who was really influencing whom?
In 1992 a debunking article noted that on February 10, 1964, a couple of weeks before Barney’s first hypnosis session with Dr. Simon, the sci-fi TV show Outer Limits aired “The Bellero Shield” which had an alien which the debunker said was similar to the image Barney drew on February  22, and therefore he might have seen the show and this had influenced his recall (which then inspired Betty to switch from Jimmy Durante to mongoloids). This explanation reflects a simplistic knowledge of science fiction.
Invasion of the cheesy Saucer Men, left, 1957.
A big headed alien is not a rare science fiction image. As early as 1938, Flash Gordon— Trip to Mars opens with two big melon-headed aliens from Mars coming to Earth to start the death ray attack. The classic This Island Earth (1955) also has an alien creature with a big head, and the kitsch but cult classic from 1957 Invasion of the Saucer Men gives us an egregious image. More conservatively, another classic Earth vs The Flying Saucers (1956) shows us a big-headed alien modeled it seems on the features of the movie’s consultant, the über UFOlogist Major Donald E. Keyhoe. By 1964, these movies had been re-run on TV many times. Thus Barney could have been influenced quite subtly over the years.
 
Or Barney’s description may come from an objective sighting.
How to lend any detailed credibility to their story?
For comparative analysis of alien physiology, there are none. Prior to this, reports of close encounters were a matter of contact with hobgoblins and robots and little green men saying “Take me to your leader.” And as we’ve seen there could be a dangerous amount of influence there already.
To be fair to the case, we have to look further. Comparative analysis can bring the Hill case closer to other UFO cases, and this is by comparing the image of the flying saucer. There are some reports of a large flying saucer out there that predate their encounter and yet seem to match their description.
We start here with an obscure 1949 case. As Coral Lorenzen (A.P.R.O.) writes it up (March 1954 issue of A.P.R.O.’s Bulletin):
This sighting was made by a college graduate who is a cattle breeder. At 1 a.m. one morning in 1949 this man stayed up in order to check on an expectant cow. This cow had never delivered without aid and was a nervous creature. When the man walked toward the barn with twine and soap and warm water, his attention was attracted to three lighted bodies to the south, arranged to form an equilateral triangle. Moving too fast for even jet planes, one peeled off and seemed to be headed directly at this man. He was terrified and he threw himself on the ground beside some gasoline drums. Suddenly he felt he had nothing to fear, and looked up. There, to his left, stationary a few hundred feet off the ground, the object hovered. He estimated its diameter as between 300 and 400 feet. Windows which seemed to be twice as high as wide were evenly placed around the edge where the over and under surfaces came together [emphasis mine]. Other two objects moved to north and became stationary, and the object near him did not revolve. Estimated thickness as 75 to 100 feet. Absolutely no sound. Light coming from windows was blue-white, man described his feeling that he felt presence of strong “vibratory” force [emphasis mine]. This fellow then describes very odd thoughts and feelings as he watched the thing. Not afraid anymore. Suddenly the thing took off for the north, vibratory sensation disappeared. Object took its lead position in the formation and all three zoomed off-at the same rate of speed. After object left, this man was aware of a red glow before his eyes, as though he had been staring at a light bulb.
Later, this man took his report to a Dr, B, who is an (or was at the time) advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission in Bio-Physics and Bio-Chemistry, also representative of People’s Division of the United Nations. Subject asked the doctor whether people would think it asinine to mention the impact of thought he was subjected to; the doctor smiled and said no, that it had long been recognized that sudden and great exposure to Gamma rays had an effect such as this man tried to describe.
Not much to go on except for the similarity of the saucer to that which Barney and Betty would describe— though here this witness estimates it as much larger. The windows are the same and so is the blue light coming from it. He obviously had some disturbing thoughts, just as Barney also apparently had while watching his saucer. There is no statement of missing time.
In the month of June 1959 Father William Gill and his mission in Boainai, New Guinea, were witnesses to more than one glowing UFO at night. On more than one occasion, one of the lights came into close quarter and could be distinguished as a giant pancake. At dusk on June 27, 1959, the most famous close quarter contact came. It was reported far and wide around the earth, even appearing in the New York Times. On this night, the craft hovered only a few hundred feet off the ground and 4 “glowing” figures were visible on top of it.
On the playing field of their Boainai mission, Father Gill and many of his native parishioners watched. Finally, they waved and those visible on the glowing craft waved back. Then one of the parishioners got a flashlight and shone it up at the craft. He rocked it back and forth. The craft responded by rocking back and forth, acknowledging the signal. The number of “figures” on top of it varied over the period of the encounter— from 2, to 3, then 4, then 2 again. In other words, they were coming and going from this top deck on the flying saucer. Gill thought he saw a railing around it. A strange blue shaft of light also shot up from it at one point.
The next night it returned and hovered in the distance. It remained for quite a while and then shot away and disappeared within seconds.
William Gill’s Anglican peers backed him up. He was reliable and there were many witnesses. However, the sighting seems impossible. Yet due to the number of eyewitnesses, it cannot be doubted that Gill and his parishioners saw what they saw. But it cannot be explained. The behavior of the UFO was beyond anything earthbound, and the changing number of people on the top deck is nothing typical or even possible on a flying saucer.  However, accepting that it is a genuine sighting of a flying saucer, there is one possible way to incorporate it with the sightings above.
A charming interpretation of the Gill flying saucer.
From the objective part of the Betty and Barney Hill incident, Barney describes this pancake saucer as tilting downward. He was thus able to look straight into the windows. Likewise, for argument’s sake here, it would seem possible that such a disc could tilt up. Therefore from this angle the bridge area behind the row of tall windows might look like it is on top of the disc and the window pane struts might look like a railing around it. Those coming and going were coming and going from the row of windows. In the Hill encounter, Barney noted that the leader remained at the window, but others were working in the background, one of them turning over his shoulder and looking at him.
Barney and Betty Hill’s report in 1961 was given such credence by UFOlogists and positive review because of the Father Gill report from 1959.
With these three incidents, spread over 1949 to 1961, we could have a saucer over 100 feet in diameter that has a row of windows along the edge where the upper and lower saucers join. The cabin area emits blue-white light. On two occasions figures are seen at the windows. It hovers a few hundred feet in the air when scrutinizing people.
What the Hill-type saucer (pancake) could look like if tilted upward. The windows could look like an exposed bridge on top of the saucer. With the background interior lights, the figures in the window could appear to be glowing, as Gill described them.
Reverend Gill and Barney Hill have given us “a form of alien.” At best, it is a silhouette. Gill gives us no details, and Barney’s details come to us years later through the not-so-reassuring pathway of hypnosis. But assuming the Gill encounter is of the same saucer Betty and Barney would see over two years later, we are merely left with “a form of alien,” a not so sure form.
This form’s evolution begins here during the Great Flap of 1965-1967. Amidst this Second Great Flap, Betty and Barney Hill’s encounter is a bestseller. Alien abductions slowly come into vogue in the 1970s after the airing of the NBC Movie of the Week based on their encounter. Along with it came the little “grays” of the movie.
But this evolution to the present is a little more involved, and it behooves us to take one more look at it with A Gray Area: How the ET Image Evolved before we continue past the 1970s and into the 1980s and, of course, to Roswell.
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