NH's UFO Abduction Plaque and the Assault on Truth

7/31/2011

The state of New Hampshire erected a historical marker commemorating the alleged UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961. According to the Hills' niece, Kathleen Marden, the state agreed to put up the marker after Marden submitted a formal request along with "20 footnotes and 28 sources listed in its bibliography." I would love to know what those sources were, since the very premise of the plaque is quite wrong:

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 south on Rte 3 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.

First, stating definitively that the object was a UFO is wrong. There is no evidence that the object every existed, let alone flew. The plaque also leaves out essential details: The Hills claimed to have seen a UFO in their September 20, 1961 report to Project Blue Book but did not claim alien abduction until Betty Hill began having nightmares weeks later (not the next day, as the plaque implies). The Hills' recalled the event under a type of "recovered memory" hypnosis now recognized as almost entirely unreliable, and many of the details are identical to details in movies and TV shows the Hills had watched only days before their hypnosis session, including an episode of The Outer Limits ("The Bellaro Shield"). A fuller discussion is available on the Skeptoid web page for the Hill abduction.

The bigger issue at stake here is the fact that New Hampshire is giving the imprimatur of of the state to an issue that is demonstrably false. The wording of the plaque, though legalistically careful, leaves the undeniable impression that New Hampshire is affirmatively stating that UFOs exist. This is the same state that (in private hands, not through official channels) made a group of colonial root cellars and some boulders into America's Stonehenge and promoted the myth of Irish Celts visiting ancient America.

Acts like a plaque commemorating an alien abduction twist history, enshrine falsehoods as facts, and trivialize actual truth at the expense of self-promotion. What will the historian or the teacher say to the student who asks how UFOs can be fake if the government has endorsed them as real? Worse, how can we judge what is true when those entrusted with curating truth willfully surrender reality to those who would re-create reality to match their fantasies?

7 Comments

terry the censor

8/3/2011 06:05:09 pm

Mr Colavito, you need to relax. The state is not putting up a sign stating, "This is the spot Adam and Eve talked to the snake 6000 years ago." It is commemorating a report of an actual event that, while poorly corroborated and subject to overwhelming doubt, has had great influence on modern culture (for right or for wrong).

Also, in your haste to condemn, you made several mistakes.

> stating definitively that the object was a UFO is wrong

That's almost a non-sequitar. UFO does not stand in for flying saucer on the plaque. The Hills said unequivocably it was an alien craft but the plaque does not say it or imply it.

> There is no evidence that the object ever existed

There is radar evidence of an unknown flying object in the vicinity at the time.

http://www.nicap.org/reports/0450-74.htm

This evidence is "weak," as described by Richard Hall of NICAP, but it is there.

http://www.nicap.org/reports/hillradarweak.htm

> not the next day, as the plaque implies

the plaque says plainly, "report of a brightly-lit cigar-shaped craft the next day," it does not imply they also reported an abduction to the AF at any time (which they never did). But you are right that the delay of the abduction report should have been made clear.

> details in movies and TV shows the Hills had watched only days before their hypnosis session, including an episode of The Outer Limits

You definitively claim they watched the show but the Hills said they did not. Also, Mr Dunning doesn't say on that page that they did watch it, he only makes the inference (though quite forcefully) that they did, based on the evidence.
I should note: Betty often claimed Barney could not have watched it, as he worked nights, however, Peter Brookesmith learned from Betty that Barney's shift began at midnight. He had opportunity to watch it, the evidence suggests he may have watched it, but there's no certainty. All we know is that Betty's denial (uncritically repeated by many) is wrong.

> The bigger issue at stake here is the fact that New Hampshire is giving the imprimatur of the state to an issue that is demonstrably false.

The plaque is worded very carefully to avoid asserting alien reality -- and quite rightly. The evidence for the case is surprising bad, and not just for the reasons you mentioned, but it is not demonstrably false. That is a patently unwarranted conclusion. As just about everyone in ufology admits (but not Stanton Friedman), the much-discussed physical evidence is either inconclusive or was never investigated at the time and boils down to hearsay (the spots on the trunk are the best example of this. Every account mentions them, but not one of the investigators looked at them, no one took a picture, no one made a drawing -- nothing! -- even though they were told about them).

I understand your concern, but before you claim an assault on truth, it would help if you had the facts straight.

terry the censor

Jason Colavito

8/4/2011 01:18:20 am

Terry, this is a blog post, not a dictate from on high. If I were really foaming at the mouth, I probably would have done a bit more than write a couple of paragraphs about a road sign.

I understand that the sign is very carefully worded to avoid making positive claims--I said as much in my post.

But it does two things I cannot support: First, it chooses to commemorate an event (the "report") that most likely never happened. Would you support road signs for ghost sightings, werewolf attacks, or fairy circles?

Second, the wording of the sign gives the impression--though not a positive statement--that the event was extraterrestrial in nature.

The reason stating that they saw a UFO is wrong is because there is no way to prove they saw anything at all, or that they truly exprienced "lost time." It is not about whether UFOs are or are not alien spacecraft (Obviously the "unidentified" precludes positive identification, but when combined with the later sentence about cigar-shaped craft and extraterrestrial abduction, what conclusion, exactly, is one meant to draw if not that the UFO was an alien spacecraft?)

You are, however, quite right that I should have inserted the word "likely" before the reference to the Outer Limits, since it is impossible to know what they watched on television on any given night. For all I know, they may only have seen a promotional spot for the show, or had a friend tell them about it.

As for the "assault on truth"--surely after this discussion of the misleading, attention-grabbing road sign you can't possibly fault me for slapping a provocative headline on a blog post? It got you to read it, just as the road sign got us all talking about alien abduction.

And that's the problem: The road sign is encouraging people to believe something that just isn't true.

Jason Colavito

Karl link

8/4/2011 02:12:57 am

||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 south on Rte 3 near Lincoln.||

My issue with the plaque is it would be far better if they put "claimed they" before "experienced". As Terry admits the UFO radar anomaly and the Hill claim of seeing a UFO do not necessarily correspond. It could be mere coincidence. What are the odds, at any given moment, there's a radar anomaly within some undefined radius of anyone's location? In other words, if I claim to see a UFO right now but I'm not, and someone has loose bounds for the "when" of a radar anomaly (1 hour either side? 2 hours either side? that day?) and loose bounds for how far away the radar set is (this airport, that air force base, no wait that airport over there, that weather radar...), would there be a good chance a dedicated searcher could match them up?

When did they report the lost time? Along side the next day report? Or some time after the fact? In either case, it's still a claim we have to take their word for.

8/4/2011 07:22:03 am

Jason, the plaque leaves a conclusion up in the air. And that must be tolerated.

http://www.anomalist.com/commentaries/pseudo.html

When I was 19, I walked past Juliet's house in Verona. Did it bother me she was not a real person, only a character in world literature, that it could not possibly be her house, and the balcony was added to conform to Shakespeare's play? Nope. I did not think the city was trying to re-write reality.

http://www.goingthroughitaly.com/1419/the-juliet%E2%80%99s-house-in-verona/

What bothers me about the Hill plaque is that hyphens are used with adverbs.

8/4/2011 07:28:51 am

@karl

In later years, Betty started to claim there were seven (!) different radar readings. When asked to provide them, she claimed a reporter had them. She agreed to fetch them for the man; later, she claimed this mystery reporter lost them!

There's a lot of "missing" evidence in the case.

8/4/2011 07:42:43 am

Terry, I'm not sure what you mean that the plaque must be "tolerated." I never said the state did not have the legal right to put up such a plaque; but I am under no obligation to silence my own distaste at what I see as a waste of government money to promote an individual's business (and Betty Hill has made her alleged abduction into a business). And don't get me wrong...there are plenty of other questionable highway markers in the US.

Surely you are not comparing the Juliet plaque (or the Sherlock Holmes plaque at Reichenbach Falls), which commemorates an admitted work of fiction, with a plaque that is designed to claim a fictional event is real. After all, the plaque explicitly says the Hills had a "close encounter" with a UFO and experienced lost time, and neither of these fantasies can be proven to exist outside the Hills' own minds.

In a world where, unfortunately, far too many people now believe Sherlock Holmes really existed, surely there is some benefit in suggesting that historical markers should reflect actual history.

8/5/2011 02:53:05 am

I'm with Jason in that as long as the plaque doesn't qualify the close encounter and lost time lead with noting it's merely their claim, the plaque should not be tolerated.