CAPTURED! (The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience)

by Stanton T. Friedman, Msc. & Kathleen Marden

Career Press/New Page Books • 3 Tice Road • P.O. Box 687 • Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417

2007, 309 pages. $16.99 (US) • ISBN-13: 978-1-56414-971-8 • ISBN-10: 1-56414-971-4

Reviewed by W. Ritchie Benedict

In many ways, the 1961 Hill abduction was the matrix of all the UFO abduction cases yet to come. It has been mentioned briefly in virtually every UFO book on the market to the point where it has almost become a cliché. After nearly half a century, it is time to revisit the details of the affair, and see if anything new can be learned. And who better to do that than Roswell expert Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden, the niece of Betty Hill.

For those very few who may not be familiar with the Hill abduction, the events in question began the evening of September 19th, 1961, when the Hills, an inter-racial couple were returning home on Route 3, just south of Lincoln, New Hampshire. Betty Hill spotted what she thought at first was a falling star in the sky. Shortly after, they encountered an unusual craft just 80 to 100 feet over the highway. Barney got out of the car with a pair of binoculars. He could see humanoid figures behind the lighted windows. A sense of unease rapidly turned into terror, as he fled the field for the relative safety of the car. The object however, followed them and buzzing sounds seemed to bounce off the trunk. They appeared to have made good their escape, but were startled when they could not account for about two hours of missing time. That might have been the end of it, were it not for a series of disturbing nightmares, so disturbing that the Hills were forced to seek the assistance of Dr. Benjamin Simon, who placed them in deep hypnotic trances. It subsequently emerged that the Hills had been taken aboard the craft and medically examined. The buried memories had so troubled Barney that he was referred to Dr. Simon by Dr. Duncan Stevens. The attempt by Mr. Hill to rationalize and deny the experience caused insomnia, high blood pressure and ulcers, as well as headaches and exhaustion. Betty, although shaken and bothered by nightmares was more accepting of the trauma. When John G. Fuller broke into the headlines with his book The Interrupted Journey, it caused a sensation, was serialized in Look magazine, and made both of the Hills into instant celebrities.

Almost immediately, questions began to arise over the veracity of the tale, and whether or not it was actually caused by the strain of Barney’s job as well as coping with the tensions of an inter-racial marriage in an era that was far from accepting such things. One key component for determining the reality of the abduction was a star map that Betty Hill observed and later drew a sketch of. There were supposedly lines denoting trade routes, seldom visited star systems and the like. Marjorie Fish, a teacher and Mensa member with an intense interest in astronomy claimed there were elements in the map, such as three stars that were not discovered by science until a decade later. It was very difficult to produce a three dimensional representation from a 2-D sketch. Dr. George Mitchell of the astronomy department at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, used one of the Fish models as a teaching tool, so convinced was he of its accuracy. As Betty Hill had no prior knowledge of astronomy, it is difficult to understand how she could have conjured up the patterns.

Barney was later furious at Dr. Simon and felt that he was trying to deceive him and write the whole thing off as some kind of a dream or hoax. What is not generally known by the public is that Betty Hill had a second experience, shortly after the death of Barney from a stroke in 1969. She saw a disc with a double row of lightened windows and humanoid figures apparently peering out. Betty suffered from ill health after 1975 and researchers became disenchanted with her attempts to launch her own investigations of people of dubious repute, who also claimed to have been abducted. At one point, an elderly gentleman observed two men in black suits enter Betty’s apartment when she was away. Kathleen Marden, one of the co-authors of this book had her own brush with unexpected intruders, when she heard footsteps and sounds over the intercom sound system that connected her apartment with that of her aunt.

Sketches of the aliens reveal creatures that somewhat resemble the typical “grey”, but yet are substantially different in certain details, such as lacking the large black eyes commonly reported. There is an abundance of little known details contained in this book, which will likely make it the final word on the Hill case for all time, unless the aliens finally decide to reveal themselves suddenly and massively. As Friedman observes, the Hills are now legend, and there is much more evidence in their favor than there is for the abduction being a fantasy. A foreword by Dr. Bruce Maccabee indicates precisely that. A thoughtful and painstaking review of a great enigma.

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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization

by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith

Bear & Company,

A division of Inner Traditions International

One Park Street • Rochester, Vermont 05767

www.BearandCompanyBooks.com

2006, 392 pages, $20.00 • ISBN: 159143061-5

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

This is a book to get excited about. It’s riveting, suspenseful, factual, and thoroughly science based. The authors are certainly not shallow armchair coach potatoes spinning tall tales as they have solid credentials and backgrounds in science and have traveled extensively to numerous archeological sites all over the North American continent to literally unearth and to piece together numerous scattered and startling clues. It’s a real-life and first-rate detective story as the authors uncover and make sense of the hidden secrets of earth’s mysterious and ancient past.

This book tackles long unresolved questions that mainstream science has failed to adequately address in regards to the history of our planet; such things as the extinction of the dinosaurs, the disappearance of the mammoths, American camel, dire wolf, and saber-toothed tigers, the disappearances of ancient Indian tribes, the sudden end of the last Ice Age, and on and on. With innumerable physical trace evidence taken from Clovis era levels of the earth at sites all over the Northern hemisphere, and the oral traditions preserved from our ancient ancestors, we can now connect the dots and recognize that some 13,000 years ago (and in other ancient time periods) horrible cosmic cataclysmic upheavals befell earth and its life causing dramatic environmental and geological changes and mass extinctions.

I had never realized how sudden and horribly lethal the extinction process must have been for so many creatures (including early man) those 13,000 or so years ago. The authors contend that a huge comet miles across came down in the then glacial ice sheet of the Hudson Bay area of Canada. Millions upon millions of tiny fiery metallic fragments traveling at estimated speeds of 3000 to 4000 miles per hour peppered the North American landscape for hundreds of miles, found in such diverse and distant Clovis era sediment sites as Murray Springs, Arizona, the Blackwater Draw near Clovis, New Mexico, and the Topper site near Allendale, South Carolina, to name but a few. Over and over again the so-called “black mat” that often identified the Clovis era level in sediment contained significantly higher levels of radioactivity, as well as thousands of those tiny and magnetic cosmic fragments!

This book contains a wealth of detailed information, charts, graphs, illustrations and photographs. A definite must read!