Betty Hill, 85; Claim of Abduction by Aliens Led to Fame

Betty Hill was the New Hampshire social worker who, along with husband Barney, claimed to have been abducted by aliens from outer space on a moonlit night 43 years ago. Their story, through circumstances not of their making, attained worldwide notoriety.

Carl Sagan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning astronomer, was among the Hills' debunkers, yet he considered their story noteworthy. It was, he wrote, "the first alien abduction story in the modern genre," the template for countless subsequent accounts of earthlings encountering intelligent beings from the outer limits.

After reluctantly going public with her experience, Hill, who died of cancer at her Portsmouth, N.H., home Oct. 17 at age 85, became a celebrity on the UFO circuit. She was known as the "first lady of UFOs," the "grandmother of all abductions."

The most thoroughly investigated, if still controversial, case in the history of alleged extraterrestrial encounters began in 1961 when the Hills said they were kidnapped by gray, cat-eyed humanoids in New Hampshire's White Mountains. At the time of the incident, they remembered nothing except that they had spied a strange object in the sky.

Later, beset by nightmares and other stress-related ailments, the couple underwent hypnosis by a reputable psychiatrist who did not believe in UFOs but concluded that the Hills were telling the truth as they knew it.

Their story was recounted in the 1966 book "The Interrupted Journey" by John G. Fuller and in a 1975 television movie, "The UFO Incident," that starred Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones as the abductees.

The movie opened a spigot in the culture. Sagan, writing in his 1996 book "The Demon-Haunted World," noted that reports of aliens capturing humans and taking them aboard oddly shaped spacecraft were "comparatively rare" before 1975. After the movie about the Hills came out, however, such accounts proliferated, fulfilling tabloid dreams, if nothing else.

Sagan, who interviewed the Hills for several hours, was impressed by their sincerity. Betty Hill, in particular, could also be acerbic and, in her own way, a skeptic.

She said the 1961 incident was the only time she had personal contact with aliens, and she scoffed at people who insisted they had had multiple visits from travelers light-years away.