The Hill abduction as counter-insurgency (Pt. 1)

Is it weird that the "aliens" chose to abduct a far-left interracial couple who were active in the civil rights movement and drew the attention of US intelligence?

For people familiar with the story, the words “Betty and Barney Hill” likely conjure up a series of mental images that have become archetypal in American culture: folks in some isolated locale being kidnapped in the night, subjected to humiliating medical experiments by now-stereotypical large-headed Grey aliens, and deposited back on the ground with their memories wiped. That basic narrative is deeply embedded in our national mythos, with countless people reporting similar experiences and countless works of science fiction integrating and reproducing the same essential plot elements over the subsequent 52 years. In fact, the main components of the modern conception of “alien abduction” are largely traceable to the Hills’ story and the media that have disseminated it. Rather than fading away, if anything, this cultural impact seems poised to widen, as Netflix is reportedly developing a new feature-length dramatization of the Hills’ experience, produced by the Obamas.

Since Betty and Barney’s story may be on the verge of a bit of a Renaissance, this seems like a good time to revisit the events and ponder what exactly might have happened. Usually, debate over the interpretation centers on three possibilities:

1. The Hills were abducted by honest-to-God extraterrestrial beings

2. During a period of stress and poor health, the Hills began to over-interpret mundane, unrelated experiences, eventually confabulating their abduction story (possibly with the help of increased suggestibility from repeated hypnosis)

3. The Hills fabricated their story for fame and money

None of those suggestions seems quite right to me, so I’m going to explore an alternative hypothesis that has received less attention, although it’s been touched on by several researchers over the years. Specifically, as you might have guessed from the title, I want to lay out the evidence that some or all of the Hills’ distressing experiences and memories were the result of nefarious activities by United States intelligence services (rather than the Greys). This perspective owes a particular debt to the work of people like Leon Davidson, Mark Pilkington, Jack Brewer, Martin Cannon, Helmut Lammer, Tanner F. Boyle, Nick Redfern, Robert Skvarla, and Greg Bishop, all of whom have either noted some of the evidence I’ll explore or helped craft the interpretive lens through which I’ll view it.

In this first installment, before even discussing the occurrence that eventually became interpreted by the Hills as an “alien abduction,” it is important to examine the environment Betty and Barney inhabited during and after the events. My usage of the term “counter-insurgency”¹ in the title of this article might seem hyperbolic, but in some ways, the Hills lived a very subversive life. Given the sociopolitical situation surrounding race in the USA in the early 1960s, the Hill marriage would have been seen as controversial even in New Hampshire, the liberal-but-lily-white state where they resided. When they married in 1960,² federal law had not yet explicitly enshrined the right for a black man to wed a white woman, and anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books in many states.³ Moreover, as recounted in the 1966 book that brought Betty and Barney’s story to a wide audience, John Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey (more on Fuller later):⁴

Their first attraction to each other, one that still remained, was of intellect and mutual interests. Together, they stumped the state of New Hampshire speaking for the cause of civil rights.

Before and after their strange experience on the night of September 19th-20th, 1961, Barney and Betty were active members in their local chapter of the NAACP,⁵ and Barney in particular seems to have been a regionally significant figure in the civil rights struggle. Here I’ll quote from a nomination Barney received in 1965 from the city councilman of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as reproduced in Kathleen Marden’s (the Hills’ niece) and Stanton Friedman’s 2007 book Captured!:⁶

I have been asked to forward the name of a prominent Negro leader of Portsmouth for consideration by Governor King as a nominee to the Human Rights Commission recently formed under a bill passed by the Legislature and signed by Governor King. It would be a great help if you could submit his name for the Governor’s consideration and the approval of the Governor’s Council.

Mr. Barney Hill, 954 State Street, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a postal worker, is eminently qualified to serve on the Human Rights Commission as a representative of the Negro race. Mr. Hill is an active member of the Portsmouth Chapter of NAACP, now serving as the Legal Redress Officer. He is presently on the Executive Board of the New England Regional Chapter of NAACP.

Mr. Hill’s sincere interest in human rights has been recognized on the national level by being appointed to the New Hampshire Advisory Board of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

On the local level Mr. Hill has been very active and effective in convincing his people of the necessity of registering as voters and making their voice heard by voting in all elections. He is convinced that the Negroes will take their rightful place in society through the educational process and steady and persistent pressure.

Along with those distinctions, Barney also founded Rockingham Community Action (a regional program in New Hampshire devoted to various poverty alleviation measures⁷) and took legal action against local businesses that refused to serve black people.⁸ In short, the Hills were loudly and publicly committed to the mission of racial equality in a time when de jure segregation of black people was yet to be federally outlawed.⁹

Importantly, it has recently emerged that the Hills’ racial advocacy may have stemmed at least in part from a deeper political commitment to the cause of communism. This claim comes from Martin Cannon, author of the controversial 1996 book The Controllers, which makes the case that many supposed alien abductions (including that of the Hills) might actually have been disguised continuations of the CIA’s infamous and blood-curdling mind control/torture experiments. In a January 2022 appearance¹⁰ on Erica Lukes’ podcast UFO Classified, Cannon described a phone conversation between ufologist Robert Durant and Betty Hill that Durant had clandestinely taped and later played for Cannon:¹¹

I found out things about the Hill case that [have] never been published…The two most important things I found out about Betty Hill from that telephone call was, one: She was a communist! …I don’t mean that in the sense that people will call you a communist if you vote Democratic. No, I mean she was literally someone that thought Russia was on the right side in the Cold War. She says exactly that in this conversation with Robert Durant. And so was Barney.

Of course, Cannon could just be making it up. One might question why he’s never said anything about this detail of the case before. In the interview he states that he didn’t include this information in The Controllers because Betty was still alive at the time of publication. As far as I can tell, Cannon isn’t prone to fabrication in his research, and (as he recounted in the interview) he eventually washed his hands of The Controllers because he was receiving too much attention from unwell people who believed without evidence that the claims in the book applied to them. He is not actively involved in related research and he no longer promotes the book, so it would be strange for him to appear on a small podcast and make up details to strengthen the thesis of The Controllers 26 years after its publication.

Betty’s childhood experiences lend credence to the idea that she and Barney harbored communist sympathies. When her father fell ill during the Great Depression, Betty’s mother took a job in a local factory and became enthusiastically involved with its burgeoning labor union. John Fuller describes the setting in which Betty came of age:¹²

[Betty’s mother] helped to organize, led strikes, and became a member of the union’s executive board. Betty was proud of her mother, watching her on the picket lines, worried about the possibility of attack by hecklers or arrest by police. During this time, the family table groaned not with food but with arguments between an uncle who was helping to organize the CIO in Lynn, a family friend who was carrying out the same chore in Lawrence, and Betty’s mother who was strictly AFL. These were exciting scenes to young Betty, with the strikes, the elections, and the celebrations.

It’s easy to see how a bright little girl immersed in the world of Depression-era labor organizing could follow that ideological path to its logical conclusion. Further, in my opinion, the credibility of Cannon’s story about the Hills’ communism is significantly bolstered by the next detail he discloses from the call:¹³

The other thing that came out in this telephone call that I thought was very interesting was that before it happened…all sorts of Air Force intelligence officers went out of their way to befriend Betty and Barney Hill. They met them…wherever they socialized, at their places of worship, you know. And Betty thought this was excusable, and didn’t think this was too unusual. I was listening to this and I thought it was extremely unusual! Because in those days, you could lose your security clearance for hobnobbing with somebody like Betty and Barney Hill. For…socializing with somebody who advocated communism! … The fact that she had these beliefs, and nevertheless all of these people in the Air Force just went out of their way to befriend them, that was unusual. And that told me that…she and Barney were on somebody’s radar before…the incident in New Hampshire happened.

This is an intriguing and important factoid. Cannon presents this as if it were new information, but it has in fact been documented by multiple other sources that Cannon may not have seen, which is why I believe it increases the credibility of his claim to have listened to a tape of Betty. For example, in 1990 UFO researcher Barb Becker received an article examining the Hill case from one Val Germann, which she forwarded to Betty Hill for comments and corrections. Becker then posted the piece on an early internet bulletin board along with Betty’s commentary, including the following noteworthy statement from Mrs. Hill:¹⁴

Most of our friends were officers at Pease AFB. Usually, we all met at the Officers Club every Friday night. Barney's best friend was a Lt. Col. in Intelligence. Jim [MacDonald] was a Major; also a friend who dated one of my best friends. Later they married. We visited each other regularly.

This rather jarring remark from Betty seems to directly confirm what Cannon claims to have heard her say about the Hills’ association with Air Force intelligence officers on her alleged phone call with Robert Durant. The friend Betty refers to, Major Jim MacDonald, will later play a significant role in this story. He happens to have had stints of employment with both the CIA¹⁵¹⁶ and Air Force intelligence.¹⁷¹⁸ Further corroboration of the Hills’ proclivity for socializing with Air Force spooks appears in Captured!, the aforementioned 2007 book by Stanton Friedman and Betty’s niece Kathy Marden:¹⁹

Major MacDonald was one of many of the Hills’ friends who were officers at Pease Air Force Base. They enjoyed social gatherings together on Saturday nights at the base officer’s club. Several also attended Betty’s and Barney’s church, where they were active in its couples group. Major MacDonald dated and later married one of Betty’s best friends, and Barney served as the best man at the wedding.

Notwithstanding the small discrepancy in the day of the week on which the Hills are reported to have regularly gathered with their friends at the Pease AFB officer’s club, this quote lines up well with Betty’s 1990 commentary and with Martin Cannon’s recent podcast claim. Author Kathy Marden’s close familial connection to the Hills and access to Betty’s diaries lend credibility to biographical information provided in Captured!. A marriage announcement published in the Portsmouth Herald on October 20th, 1962 confirms that Barney was best man at MacDonald’s wedding, along with the detail that Betty served as maid of honor.²⁰

Given the veracity of Cannon’s claim that the Hills were unusually chummy with Air Force intelligence officers and the lack of obvious incentive for him to lie, I believe Cannon heard the recording he said he heard. As such, it seems likely that the Hills were indeed communists. It is very difficult to imagine that a pair of dirty Reds who were actively involved in the black civil rights struggle of the early 1960s would organically develop such close relationships with multiple spooks. Remember, Betty wrote that “most of our friends were officers at Pease AFB” and “Barney's best friend was a Lt. Col. in Intelligence.” The Hills were attendants of honor at the wedding of “ex”-CIA, “ex”-Air Force intelligence Major Jim MacDonald. And it seems that Betty must not have been very careful about hiding her communist sympathies if she was willing to divulge the Hills’ support for the USSR over the phone to a UFO researcher.

The fact that the Hills were socially involved with multiple spooks despite their beliefs and political activities is enough for me to feel confident that they had drawn the interest of one or more US intelligence agencies prior to their abduction experience. Their geographic location further strengthens this idea, as the Hills lived a 10 minute drive from Pease AFB, which at the time happened to be a Strategic Air Command base.²¹ In other words, Betty and Barney lived directly adjacent to a place that, according to Wikipedia, “maintained a combat-ready force for long-range bombardment and nuclear strikes. B-47 Stratojet, B-52 Stratofortress, and FB-111 Aardvark bomber aircraft, as well as KC-97 Stratofreighter and KC-135 Stratotanker air refueling aircraft and C-97 Stratofreighter, C-124 Globemaster and C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft, were all based at Pease AFB at varying times.”²² The Hills had a regular weekend appointment to hang out with their spook buddies at a node in the US Air Force’s command-and-control network for nuclear weaponry.

I may be beating a dead horse at this point, but I think the above adds a whole additional layer to things: it is extremely bizarre for a pair of communist-leaning civil rights activists to be permitted to hang out with intelligence personnel on and around an active nuclear base. Given this, there is no question in my mind that Betty and Barney were being closely monitored and evaluated. Although details of Air Force intel’s participation in domestic surveillance during the 1960s are hard to come by, we know they were compiling and disseminating secret bimonthly reports called “Significant Counterintelligence Briefs” (SCIBs) from the 1950s until at least the early 1970s.²³²⁴ SCIBs synthesized and analyzed data from local law enforcement, the FBI, and other federal agencies on foreign and domestic security threats. In the domestic realm they were especially focused on the threats presented by communism and black radicalism. Although Pentagon officials implausibly told the New York Times that Air Force intelligence did not participate in the surveillance of civilians,²⁵ the established remit of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) to gather information on potential threats to Air Force bases would have placed a big “Red” target on the Hills. Their social relationships are consistent with this.

This entry is already too long, so I’ll wrap it up here. Now that we have this essential context — i.e. Betty and Barney Hill were interracially married communist civil rights activists living beside a nuclear base with a bunch of close spook friends — in the next installment, we’ll actually talk about the purported abduction and the process by which the Hills were helped to reconstruct their famous story. If we take their memories seriously, a case can be made a la Martin Cannon that the Hills were subjected to some kind of covert medical experimentation by US intelligence services that was made to appear like an alien abduction. If we instead reject their memories as confabulations, we are still left with a series of fascinating questions as to why and how they came to believe what they believed. The experiences the Hills believed they had profoundly altered the course of their lives, eventually overshadowing and disrupting their civil rights activities. Could their intelligence-affiliated friends have intentionally worked to guide their memories and beliefs in certain directions?

1. I used the NATO spelling of “counter-insurgency” with a hyphen in the middle because the full word “counterinsurgency” was long enough that the “-y” spilled over onto a second line in the title display for mobile users.

2. Marden, Kathleen, and Stanton T. Friedman. 2007. Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books. Pg. 162.

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States

4. Fuller, John G. 2022. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a UFO - the Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. First Vintage Trade Ebook edition. New York: Vintage, a Division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Pg. 23.

5. Ibid, pg. 23.

6. Marden and Friedman, pg. 183.

7. https://my.americorps.gov/mp/listing/viewListing.do;jsessionid=3aBXBz8QJ_ee318TuFUgSmPb2r3PLwwvcOMR2FyNHHo4GURkSaJV!1064273592?id=32474&fromSearch=true

8. “The UFO Romance of Betty and Barney Hill.” n.d. Accessed August 6, 2023. http://www.seacoastnh.com/the-ufo-romance-of-betty-and-barney-hill/?showall=1.

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_United_States

10. Full appearance of Martin Cannon on UFO Classified:
https://www.youtube.com/live/ahRZW2nmeSM

11. Time-stamped link to the relevant portion of the Cannon interview: https://www.youtube.com/live/ahRZW2nmeSM?feature=share&t=4086
Tweet with clip of the relevant portion of the Cannon interview, thanks to @__dregs__:
https://twitter.com/__dregs__/status/1683157618506989569

12. Fuller, John G. 2022. The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a UFO - the Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. First Vintage Trade Ebook edition. New York: Vintage, a Division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Pg. 28.

13. Time-stamped link to the relevant portion of the Cannon interview:
https://www.youtube.com/live/ahRZW2nmeSM?feature=share&t=4250

14. “INTELLIGENCE, MEDIA CONNECTIONS IN UFO CASES.” 1990. https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/alien.ufo/capturehil.ufo.
Archived version:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130126203623/https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/alien.ufo/capturehil.ufo

15. Webb, Walter. 1965. “A Dramatic UFO Encounter in the White Mountains, New Hampshire: The Hill Case - Sept. 19-20, 1961.” NICAP. Pg. 13. http://www.nicap.org/reports/610919hill_report2.pdf.

16. Marden and Friedman, pg. 56.

17. Fuller, pg. 69.

18. Marden and Friedman, pg. 56.

19. Ibid, pg. 56.

20. Portsmouth Herald. 1962. “Arline Gale Weds,” October 20, 1962.

21. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pease_Air_National_Guard_Base

22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pease_Air_National_Guard_Base#History

23. Szulc, Tad. 1971. “Secret Reports Keep Air Force Informed on Radicals.” The New York Times, January 29, 1971, sec. Archives. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/01/29/archives/secret-reports-keep-air-force-informed-on-radicals-bimonthly.html.

24. United States Congress Senate Committee on Armed Services Subcommittee on Special Preparedness. 1962. Military Cold War Education and Speech Review Policies: Hearings Before the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services, Subcommittee on Special Preparedness, Eighty-Seventh Congress, Second Session. U.S. Government Printing Office, pg. 1931-1932.

25. Szulc.