Here's the teaser: Betty and Barney Hill's UFO is still there. You can go see it for yourself. Jim says it looks darned spooky.

I hope you are not going to disabuse me of this comforting notion.

And I like Andras Corbin Arthen's theory that the people who today have alien abduction experiences would have "gone to visit the elves" long ago...they have a lot of things in common like lost time, non-human humanoids (often diminutive), etc. Andras thinks it's a real experience (i.e. they're not lying), but it's a spiritual one, not an ordinary-reality one.

Carl Sagan mentioned this idea in A Demon Haunted World. Was he borrowing from Arthen?

Tonight, on Alpine Abductions...
Keep watching the skis!

Did you ever hear of the mid 19th-century airship sightings? Supposedly during the mid-late 1800s, people in various remote parts of the US reported meeting friendly visitors descending from the sky in giant airships, who explained they were just traveling from some-remote-part-of-Europe in these airships, and they're the latest thing on the continent.... only of course there wasn't any such thing.

The weakest part of abduction stories, like a weak case against a murder suspect, is "motive".

Why would highly advanced aliens travel a tremendously long distance, at astronomical (ha ha) costs, just to kidnap somebody? What's their motive? (Excessive boredom?)

Wow.

I feel as though three phases of my fannish existence just hopped into a Tardis to have tea at Milliways.

she wrote. “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.”

Anyone know what Barney Hill did in WW2, because this sounds like a flashback, some sort of PTSD? Though is seems a dreadfully long time after the war. Still, something like that would really screw up anything from hypnosis.

I'm sure many Pacific Islanders in times gone by used the same argument to demonstrate why White Europeans were a myth.

Perhaps we need to concede that an alien culture might have alien motivations.

Mac

So Jim set them up, right? He made a deal with his masters from beyond the void and sacrificed these two innocents to monsters of unholy lust.

I think I should definitely write this up. The truth needs to be told.

My theory has always been that they heard through the galactic grapevine about a strange race of beings that believes it is being visited by flying saucers and so, astonished, they came down here to have a look for themselves.

I'd always heard it was because Earth women were hot. That probably didn't apply to Betty at her age, though.

What I want to know is where are J and K when we really need them?

I told my mom about it, and she explained what folie a deux meant.

They were from France? Snrk.

MAO

Perhaps we need to concede that an alien culture might have alien motivations.

I've heard this theory before and, based on my own experience with sleep paralysis, I find it plausible.

Having said that, I will lay a small wager that there is at least one person reading this thread who has had what he or she believes was an alien abduction experience. I would love to hear about it. I personally won't try to argue you out of it, though I won't say I won't find the notion dubious. And I can understand hesitancy in the face of what would likely be an avalanche of skepticism. I have talked with people who describe having had this experience. They are usually extremely shy about discussing it.

Still. If you have a story you feel like telling, I personally would be interested in hearing it.

This requires some setup, but I promise there's a connection.

So back before GURPS (it's a roleplaying game) did its most recent reboot, they put out a setting book called GURPS Technomancer. The premise was that Oppenheimer's Death-Destroyer-of-Worlds quote, in combination with the atomic bomb test, had ripped a hole in reality and let, basically, magic in. So the setting was essentially "what the 2nd half of the 20th century would look like if magic suddenly worked".

There were some very neat bits--why, yes, JFK was killed with a literally magic bullet, why do you ask? Eva Peron's cancer was cured by magic, and she was still running Argentina in the 1990s. And the sidebar on "sidhe abductions", complete with teensy implanted metallic "elfshot". I thought that was so beautiful, it was almost worth the price of the book on its own.

My guess: Some oddball thing happens, and the person maps it to the best match they can find, and then retells the memory internally till it is internally consistent. This underlying oddball thing could conceivably be contact with space aliens or spirits or angels, though I am pretty skeptical of that. But the nature of memory is that people tend to reconstruct a sensible story from what is remembered, and this can be really far from reality.

It's really a fascinating experience to read old journal entries or to try to reconstruct a sequence of events from documentary evidence, and compare it with what you remember. I recall putting together a resume a few years back that I had messed up a bunch of sequences of events (order of classes as reported on my transcript, sequence of school/job/life events, etc), including some for which I had enough logical consistency in my "memories" that I would have bet a lot of money on my memories being right. I guess that extremely intense and scary experiences, and experiences that you see in a very different light many years later, are much worse in this regard than fairly simple and unemotional things like "when did I take that finance class, when did I take statistics, and when did I overlap the ideas between them?"

I do not personally have such an experience, but I have two accounts from friends--directly from the person, in both cases. One claims to have seen a UFO outside his window while fully awake (and he also has sleep paralysis, which he says is scary and completely different); the other is a more conventional "abduced from bed" story with a bit of a twist to it.

He says that the aliens, as is apparently fairly common, carried him through the wall and that while they were doing so he noticed a carpenter's pencil in the wall space. He chalked it up to a dream, but several years later, when renovations of the room were undertaken, a carpenter's pencil was in the wall in the right spot. He tells me that he thinks it's possible he had the abduction dream and then went back and unconsciously filled in the pencil afterwards, but that's not how he remembers it; he remembers having seen the pencil before the wall came down.

Well, given the very low number of "hot Earth wimmen" that have been abducted, I'd say that theory was bogus.

Otherwise, we'd be having an epidemic of abducted NFL cheerleaders or similar groups.

I think that theory first came up in 1978, with French writer Bertrand Meheust. If you can read French, the link below will take you to the site of SF writer Elisabeth Vonarburg, who talks about the recent re-release of Meheust's book:

http://www.noosfere.org/heberg/auteurstf3/Sommaire.asp?site=58

Okay, these are flares. I live not far from Barry Goldwater range and I see these lights on a very regular basis. They're military flares. And the famed "lights" are up there four or five nights of the week. The news media just chose to make a story out of it.

Anyway, /vent

Several years ago I was driving home on Maricopa Road -- which, at the time, before Phoenix vomited urban sprawl into Pinal County, was a lonely country road. It was possible to crash and not be seen until dawn if you ran off the road on on a particular curve.

So I come up on this curve and there's a guy in the road frantically waving his arms. I figured he'd been in a wreck or had seen one, got my cell phone out, stopped, cracked my window, and asked him what happened.

"They're coming! They're coming!"

-- The guy's pointing at the flares, which, as I said, are so common as to not even merit mention by the locals.

He continued to rant, "You've got to turn back! They're out there! They're coming!"

... I put my foot on the gas and left him in the dust, then called the cops to report Teh Crazy In Teh Road Stopping Teh Traffic.

Couldn't help but think, though, that if he'd had a video camera and had submitted pictures of his "UFOs" to the local media it's quite likely that there would have been a new round of Phoenix Lights stories. Because the local media just loves to carry those stories ...

There are often similarities between "recovered" memories of alien abduction and "recovered" memories of abuse by Satanic cults...in particular, women claiming to have had a child when there is no evidence of such.

Do non-technological societies have similar abduction/fairy realm stories that haven't been updated to incorporate European airships or UFOs?

So that's the closest anyone I know has come to an alien abduction story. My uncle the rocket scientist occasionally tries to figure out what the UFO might have been ("streetlight?" "it was too big"; "reflected light from a nearby house?" "it was too BIG"), but without success. It has passed into family lore and we all accept that Cindy saw a UFO.

Here's a sample for right now: Old Route 3, to give you an idea of what it would have looked like in 1961 (a section that was cut off when the road was straightened and improved, about six miles north of Colebrook).

I'm about to embark on a detailed commentary on Chapter One of The Interrupted Journey.

This will, alas, be long. Fortunately, the RSS Feed has already gone, I think, so folks' email (or whatever -- I'm unclear on how RSS Feeds work) won't be too clogged.

That's a pretty area, by the way.

K.C., #45: Yes, what your Aunt Cindy saw was a UFO -- an unidentified flying object. What she didn't see was an alien spacecraft, because then it wouldn't be unidentified, now would it? :-) I'm with Asimov on this issue; if people want to insist that they're alien spacecraft, then don't call them UFOs, call them alien spacecraft... or flying saucers.

BTW, Arthur C. Clarke wrote an essay titled something along the lines of "Flying Saucers I Have Known", which I highly recommend to anyone who's interested in this sort of thing. The account of one such item which turned out to be a flaming golf ball from a trash fire, rocketing around the garden spitting sparks as it went, had me laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

See, now, were I driving along that particular road late at night, I'd be half expecting to be alienly abducted, myself. But then I love scary stories about The Lonely Woods, Late at Night. The best thing about being a Cub Scout was going on overnight camp-outs to The Scary Woods. "The Blair Witch Project" was right up my secret fears alley.

Honestly, truly, bringing that pic up in my browser just now, in the context of this discussion, I got a little chill right up my spine.

Indeed it is. And well-supplied with tourist cabins that can be rented by the day or by the week, for people who want to spend some time where it's usually at least ten degrees cooler than New York or Boston, even in the heat of summer.

Also -- if you're interested in making a thorough getaway -- the local cell phone service is spotty at best. If the office wants to find you, they may have to send out scouts on foot.

But, lo, what contactee craziness Betty Hill has inspired since then, especially in the Internet age. For instance, the vast, many-leveled parking garage of conspiracies, contacts, and psycho-ceramics found at zetatalk.com, where you can read about the Hills' encounter straight from the ETs themselves here, here, and probably elsewhere.

Looking forward to rest of Jim's report with enthusiasm.

Sleep paralysis, as Teresa could tell you, is normal during REM. People who don't have it are commonly known as sleepwalkers. If you have a sleep disorder you may have it without REM or have REM when you're partially awake. Seeing lights moving in the sky is a very simple kind of hallucination; Teresa's descriptions of some of the things she's seen go wayyy beyond that.

The first time I saw a UFO I was a child, and hadn't yet figured out that sometimes you get stuff on the lens of your eye, too small to hurt but big enough to show up. Since then I've seen a number of things that I, for one, could not identify, which makes them UFOs, but I don't actually believe they were alien spacecraft.

The thing that gets me is, if the aliens want to study some humans, why don't they ever take the ones who really want to go? I'd be delighted to take part in some alien interaction! (And no, ethan and Michael Weholt, I'm not referring to that old Kids In The Hall sketch, where the alien says "Qba'g lbh guvax guvf vf xvaq bs cbvagyrff? Jr cvpx hc gurfr Rneguyvatf, cebor gurz nanyyl, naq chg gurz onpx, naq fb sne nyy jr'ir qvfpbirerq vf gung gra creprag bs gurz qba'g zvaq ng nyy!" [might be slightly NSFW if you use a really big font])

More seriously, when I was an extremely troubled (and rather weird) adolescent, I spent a lot of time standing on the highest place I could find within walking distance of home (none too high in glacier-scraped Michigan), calling occupants of inteplanetary craft. Now, I might not have been much of a projective telepath, but you'd think I'd've gotten something for all those hours and hours of standing there thinking, with all the force and drama of an adolescent in the grips of those opera-sized emotions adolescents have, "Please come and take me away. I don't belong here. Please come and take me away."

Needless to say, my cries fell on deaf telepathic receptors, if there were any.

We're a speck (on a speck)^n, as wassisname says. And we're way out on the edge of the galaxy. It's unlikely we're the only intelligent beings in the universe, or even in our galaxy, but also unlikely that anyone could or would visit us. Any radio signals we picked up from them would be after their solar system died, and they won't get ours until we've been gone for millions of years.

It would be nice to believe in FTL technology (has anyone debunked Asaro's theory about it yet?). And yes, aliens will have motives we don't understand. But given our speck^n-ness, even if aliens found us worthy of visiting, how would they find us? Even if they can go faster than c, our radio signals can't; how would they know to look for us, out in this unlikely and sparsely-populated (starwise) backwater of the galaxy? It just seems fabulously unlikely.

I want it. I really, really want to meet a member of a nonhuman intelligent species someday. But since when do people like us get what we want?

That's something I try not to think about too much when the subject comes up, because it makes me unreasonably irritable. Do I believe in UFOs? Of course I do, and everyone else does too, because to believe there's never gonna be anything flying around that you can't name right away is preposterous. Whether I believe in flying saucers is a completely different question.

You mean you didn't wave a towel around? No wonder you didn't get picked up!

Because some of us like our reality as-is, complete with natural wonders.

Explaining what previously was unexplainable is the ultimate exercise in critical thinking. It'd be really nifty if there were aliens but it's even better that, with just a tweak of our perceptions, we can see how easily it is to shape our experienced world into something fabricated by our subconscious. Even better, we learn just how bizarre and wonderful the world is, without having to fill in the holes in our perception with elves and aliens.

Plus, thinking is just cool.

Not that that's ever worked for ME, more's the pity. And if it did work, with my luck, Jareth's reign would be over and the current Goblin King wouldn't look nearly so fetching in tights.

I've known people consistently mis-estimate their average travel speeds, sometimes quoting ridiculous journey times. In any case, peak speeds might be quite high, without much changing the average speed.

It's also quite possible that a speedometer would be over-reading, without giving a grossly wrong distance record. There's two mechanisms driven from the same source.

One of my favorite books is Miracle Visitors by Ian Watson. Fiction, but it seemed more convincing than any "factual" books of alien abduction I had read.

If you showed my the picture without an identifier and asked me to guess, I'd spend a lot of time wondering if this was a trick question, and this was maybe a picture of the road to a relative's house.

Of course, you're only going to get any speed on that road if you're well-acquainted with it, and it's daylight in good weather. With a stick shift, on some stretches you'd be changing gears almost as often as you do with town driving.

And the anal probes? Just a bit of zipless rishathra with the natives?

Agree totally. We used to go banging along roads like that in Kentucky at much too high a speed after dark; it was my father's one thrill-seeking habit. Lots of times we'd go out with the expressed intention of chasing thunderstorms, flickers barely visible beyond the horizon; we never caught one, but the lights looked spooky enough to make one think of flying saucers.

It may be that the aliens don't have anuses themselves and so misinterpret ours as spiritual paths.

Wait, is this the religion thread...?

I know mine is.

It's a measure of how fundamentally we all believe Einstein that anything which requires him to be wrong is regarded as deranged.

A bit like Darwin, in that respect.

Well, now really, if you received an impassioned telepathic cry from a teenager, would you pick him up and carry him off to live with you? I had two teenage sons at one point, and my answer would be "no". I'd find someone who wouldn't be quite such a handful.

As for the probability of contact, read David Brin's essay on the Fermi Paradox. I think he's posted it on his blog/website somewhere. Basically, if there's someone out there in this galaxy at all, they can visit every solar system in the galaxy in less than 3 million years for a small initial capital outlay if they're willing to build and launch a relatively small number of von Neumann probes, that arrive at a star system, build a few more of themselves, and all move on.
No FTL drive needed, and the time can be reduced considerably if each probe builds hundreds more at each stop instead of only a handful.

Ah, but the path to what?

But no one wants to hang around with angsty emo teenagers except, you know, other angsty emo teenagers (not even — heck, maybe especially not — former angsty emo teenagers like myself); so unless the aliens were also dramatic adolescents who thought that Earth sucked, they'd probably fly the other direction, fast. And if they were of the opinion that Earth sucked, they probably wouldn't be hanging around here, on account of their fancy interstellar spacecraft and all.

So your target audience was probably limited to bored alien kids whose parental units were stuck on Earth as zoologists or whatever, and who had their learner's permits but weren't allowed to leave the solar system.

I recall, at a young age, being taken from my home. I was surrounded by people dressed in white and all I could see were their eyes. They did things to me that hurt, and probed me with various instruments (yes, even there). After a while I awakened and I was back home.

What actually happened was this: when I was four, the family came home from a shopping trip. I went into my room, tripped, and hit the bridge of my nose on the edge of the toy box. My mom and dad heard my screams, grabbed me (and I presume the rest of my siblings) and rushed me to the emergency room, where they examined me, determined the extent of my injuries, x-rayed my skull, took my temperature (rectally), applied a local, then stitched up my nose.

I was four and I barely remember the episode, but I do remember enough to note the similarity to abductee reports. How many of them had similar episodes when very young?

That sounds like an exaggerated version of a poll done in the 1990s, which claimed that about 2% of Americans had experiences "suggestive of" an alien abduction. What the poll did was ask a sample of people if they'd had various experiences (e.g., sleep paralysis; experiencing an hour or more of lost time; seeing strange lights they couldn't explain; etc.). The authors of the poll then interpreted positive answers to enough of the questions as somehow indicating alien abduction.

So what the authors of the poll actually claimed (using highly dubious logic, to say the least) was that about 2% of Americans could have experienced alien abduction -- not that any particular fraction actually said they'd been abducted.

anyone here seen Ratatouille? remember the Pixar short at the beginning, about the (failed) alien abduction?

there's your alien teenager out crashing the family car...or family spaceship, as it were...

I don't IGNORE them, which is what those damned aliens did to me. Bastards.

To which my usual response is, "Yes. And that means I can also tell the difference between science fiction and fantasy."

Yes, that was hilarious. Typical terrific Pixar animation; with characters like that, who needs dialog?

How about Gerry Anderson's U.F.O.? Remember the year 1980, when the men wore jumpsuits, and the Moonbase's female personnel wore bright purple wigs?

The Moonbase, the submersible supersonic interceptors, the AI tracking satellite, the silver miniskirts, and the VTOL-airlifted anti-saucer crawlers were all secret. For all we know, they're still out there defending the Earth, mostly successfully, except for the occasional stray Peruvian death meteor.

(Serge and I seem to share a fondness for certain kinds of schlock SF... Fumetti, anyone?)

Jim, great work! I'm looking forward to the next part.

I used to watch that one too; that and Space: 1999 are about all I remember of that year or two in Boston (not my favorite place). But tell me, how can you keep those miniskirts secret as long as there are hetero males around? And also, how did the actors keep from being beheaded by the gullwing doors of the cars when they got out? Looked to me like the props guys had snorted one too many DeLoreans.

Indeed. Gerry Anderson's oeuvre was a great part of my initial exposure to SF. Supercar... Stingray... Fireball XL-5... Yes, he has a lot to answer for.

Ever since I moved here I've been wanting to do a midnight tagging raid on the exit sign on Route 217 that marks Allen Road. I figure just black out the a bit of the second 'l' and we'll see how long it takes before people start talking about "Alien Road". It drives me nuts every time I go by there because that's the only way I can read it now.

Although with the way the whole immigration issue is going I'm not sure but it wouldn't start a real ruckus: that part of Beaverton is where a lot of Hispanics have been moving in as the Asians move west out of the first ring suburb. This whole area has been playing Musical Minorities for a couple of decades now.

For the Fermi Paradox: While all the alien civilizations will conclude that there must be older, more advanced civilizations out there, one of them will be wrong.

I wonder if we are the most advanced civilization in the universe?

I don't see any reason to exclude that possibility. Granted, the age of our system is, what, 1/3 to 1/2 the estimated age of this universe? My feeble amount of astronomy suggests to me that no sort of life that we are familiar with could arise from a system around An Original Star (i.e., one that didn't arise from the detritus of a nova or supernova) so it seems reasonable to me that all occupied systems might be as young as, or younger than, our system.

It's got to be a razor-edged race to be the oldest, though. What's the age difference between a stone-age civilization and a star-faring one? If we make it 10,000 years further on, I'll bet we'll be star-faring in some manner or other, either robotically or what-all. 10,000 years is a tiny fraction of the age of a system capable of giving rise to life (as we know it). If there are a bunch of life-capable systems out there, and we are the oldest, 10,000 years from now we could be in the midst of an incredible blossoming of contacts.

Or, maybe we aren't the oldest and it could start tomorrow, or even later tonight.

All of which, I'm sure, only exposes my genuine ignorance on this subject.

Speaking of which, a friend entertained me while I was sick by (among other things) showing me episodes from his DVD box set of the UFO series. We only saw some of the Gerry Anderson series in Oz, so I don't recognise all of the examples here; my fave was Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (poster) with its unseen villains — how can you have a schoolgirl crush on a puppet? People are strange.

But gullwing door cars, like the series, distinctly pre-date the 1980s Delorean, e.g. the Mercedes Benz 300L (some here) is from the 1950s.

I'd read that.

That's half a dozen reasons, to go with the impossible things some people believe before breakfast.

I loved the show U.F.O. I particularly liked the one where the aliens made Straker think he was actually an actor on a sci-fi TV show about UFOs and aliens. That sort of paranoid recursiveness worked well with the genre.

The whole alien thing seems to go in phases. Other than a few singletons like the "Phoenix lights", you don't have people getting rectally probed every other week.

I wonder if the conspiracy hounds have found other outlets in governmental conspiracies and it's just a few old-timers still pulling for the flying saucers. I just ran across the Denver Airport conspiracy yesterday (thanks, Wikipedia!). I've never been through the new airport, but it's apparently chockablock of Evil artwork and Evil coded messages, and let's not forget the Masons.

We might not be the oldest, but we're very likely the oldest for some distance around. It's possible, even at velocities no higher than 10% of c to explore every star in a galaxy the size of ours (between 400 and 1,000 billion stars) in less than 10 million years based on what I think are fairly conservative technological abilities that we could develop in the next few hundred years. So it doesn't take long even in biological terms, let alone geological or astronomical terms, to cover a lot of distance. At the same rate I think we could expand to the entire local group of galazies, total more than 5 trillion stars, I'd guess, in a volume 10 million light years across in less than 200 million years.

So if they haven't gotten here yet they must be coming from a long ways away.

It's quite possible we're the only ones in the galaxy, or at least the only intelligence currently exhibiting both curiousity and technological means --, or, at least, dreams.

I do wonder what the odds are of another techonological civ arising if we disappeared from the earth. How long would it take? What would it be? Another primate? Cetacea? African Grays?

It's not clear that intelligence provides either a long-term survival advantage, so that once achieved an intelligence species is likely to persist for a long time, or that there is a typical evolutionary path to intelligence that is sufficently stable all along its length as to give a high enough probability of completing it that a significant number (> 1) of species will actually do so in the lifetime of life on Earth.

Maybe if we do ourselves in, nothing will replace us. Or maybe half a dozen species will dance around our graves.

Don't know how cows feel about being tipped, but it surprised my horse.

Locally, our felines (indoor variety) are complaining about having been scooped up into boxes last Saturday, put in a unnaturally fast vehicle, and taken to a place full of bright lights, white walls, and strange furniture, where not-our-aliens gave them rectal probes, shots, stared at their teeth and clipped their claws. They were taken back to their home at the end of all this and released, but it was all most upsetting.

It was all very upsetting.

"Darwin saw clearly that the succession of life on this planet was not a formal pattern imposed from without, or moving exclusively in one direction. Whatever else life might be, it was adjustable and not fixed. It worked its way through difficult environments. It modified and then, if necessary, it modified again, along roads which would never be retraced. Every creature alive is the product of a unique history. The statistical probability of its precise reduplication on another planet is so small as to be meaningless. Life, even cellular life, may exist out yonder in the dark. But high or low in nature, it will not wear the shape of man. That shape is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and identically human is ever to come that way again."
...
"In a universe whose size is beyond human imagining, where our world floats like a dust mote in the void of night, men have grown inconceivably lonely. We scan the time scale and the mechanism of life itself for portents and signs of the invisible. As the only thinking mammals on the planet -- perhaps the only thinking animals in the entire sidereal universe -- the burden of consciousness has grown heavy upon us. We watch the stars, but the signs are uncertain. We uncover the bones of the past and seek for our origins. There is a path there, but it appears to wander. The vagaries of the road may have a meaning, however; it is thus we torture ourselves."

"Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments, handled by strange manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever."

-- Loren Eiseley, "Little Men and Flying Saucers," The Immense Journey

DANG!

Thanks for that - Loren Eiseley was one of our best essayists.

I remember, around the same time, falling hard for the von Daniken nonsense--oh, it was totally plausible! It was!--and spending altogether too much time looking up at the sky, and kinda wishing a lot. This was before I also learned that one should always be careful what one wishes for.

When I first got onto the Internet in the early 90s, when you had to have so many different utilities to do different jobs, I discovered vast troves of fascinating UFO/alien-related documents in an archive at Rutgers University, and spent a lot of time downloading and reading them. They were all of the form of badly written and formatted text files about everything from secret aliens at Groom Lake, to CIA Mind Control (MK-Ultra, and everything), to you name it. I found that I was more interested in how passionately the people concerned believed in all this stuff than I was in the stuff itself. What was it about the material that stirred up such extraordinary passions, that made the believers (and the equally passionate disbelievers, for that matter) so intense? The material itself was thin and not that convincing, but you had people investing their whole selves in it, like a religious ecstasy, only involving "Space Brothers".

Nowadays, of course, even if it did turn out that the US government had a bunch of dead alien guys on ice at Groom Lake or somewhere similar, I'm inclined to think nobody much would give a damn, since everything else the government is doing is so much more terrifying, worrying, etc.

That all said, Jim, that was a damn fine post (I've now read the whole thing). Good on ya for going out there and looking into it all in such detail.

That is the most terrifying thing I have seen all week.

A van Neumann approach might not have the background energy consumption of a civilisation, but the change in system radiation as the next salvo of probes is fired off might be detectable.

Variable stars?

Variable stars?

I think there was a Larry Niven short story where the first signs of aliens approaching the Solar System was the "nova" they set off in another system to speed them on their way.

Alas, most well-studied variable stars have plausible physical mechanisms that explain their variability without needing aliens or von Neumann machines.

On the other hand, the various forthcoming all-sky surveys (ground-based and space-based) are probably going to turn up tens or hundreds of millions of previously unknown variable stars, so there's room to speculate about exotic mechanisms for a while yet.

It's reasonable to assume that you do need a fair amount of "metals" (astronomer-speak for all elements other than hydrogen and helium) in the cloud that a star forms out of to end up with planets and such, which does indeed require several rounds of supernovas.[*] And the Sun is a relatively "metal-rich" star, as stars go. (And "1/3 the estimated age of the universe" is spot-on.)

But you can get several rounds of "star formation -> supernova -> metal-enriched gas clouds -> new star formation" in a surprisingly short time[**], if the conditions are right. The central region of our galaxy has quite a few stars that are as metal-rich as the Sun -- or more -- but are billions of years older. Stars that are both older than the Sun and metal-rich are relatively rare out in our part of the disk, but they do exist. (It's speculated that they may have formed closer in to the galactic center, and been scattered out to larger radius by some mechanism, perhaps by the gravitational influence of the galactic bar.)

So even if you make the assumption that intelligent life requires a star as metal-rich as the Sun, you're still going to have a significant number of candidate stars in our galaxy that are several billion years older than the Sun.

[*] Or supernovae, if you prefer your plurals to be Latinate. (Novas/novae are different beasts, and don't contribute a whole lot.)

[**] Astronomers, like geologists, have screwy time scales, so "surprisingly short" here means something like "only tens or hundreds of millions of years."

And I could imagine that sort of clothing in some nightclubs. Look at the fashion crazes of the last thirty years. But they didn't become uniforms or flood the market.

Fuchsia.

Re aliens and why they're not here: the universe could be full of intelligent beings that, for various cultural and practical reasons, are not impelled to leave their home planets.

Bruce Cohen @ #91, Check this out. (No, I didn't do it.)

I eagerly await learning how these two were convinced that they had been "abducted".

I love it when people who know what they are talking about pipe up. So let me ask you...

According to my reading, I get the impression the central region of our galaxy is a pretty dangerous neighborhood to try to live in. All sorts of untoward activities going on mostly? partly? because of the "overcrowding".

Now, space is an enormous place and even if you live in a crowded and dangerous neighborhood, you still could live billions of years without any of the local thugs knocking your developing species into the next dimension (if any).

So yes, even though the central region may have an enormous number of older, metal-rich systems, it may be harder for a system to avoid various cosmic catastrophes that could wipe out a species developing toward intelligence.

Do you think the dangerousness of the central region neighborhood could have a significant effect on the chances of an intelligent species developing around an older, metal-rich star?

I think you're thinking of "The Fourth Profession" - the aliens are traders, normally they deal with systems that can build launching lasers. But if a species isn't "civilized" enough to build such a laser, either through lack of technology or will, they're only animals, so it's ok to blow up their sun for that extra push on to the next potential client system. Mustn't risk the ship, after all! The main character apparently convinces one of the aliens that causing a nova is wrong, and convinces a gov. agent that humans *must* build the laser to avoid an artificial nova, and the world is saved.

Re. UFOs and cats: http://dropline.net/cats/kitty/i-wants-to-beliefs

There are some nice engineering tradeoffs when you're sending intelligent machines rather than biological organisms. Since they're self-reproducing, it's not at all hard to add self-repair, so their effective mission length can be made much longer. This means using lower transit velocities is possible, and energy is quadratic with velocity. Also, the size of the delivered payload can be quite small if you're willing to spend a few generations bootstrapping up to the machines that will actually do the work at the destination; I wouldn't be surprised if really good nanotech let you send an entire expedition in a single nanowhisp massing less than a gram. Enough engineering cleverness and the energy requirements would be so small we couldn't see the effects of launching from more than a few light-years away, and then maybe only if we were staring down the barrel of the launcher. In which case we'd find out pretty soon anyway.

been scattered out to larger radius by some mechanism, perhaps by the gravitational influence of the galactic bar.)

Or by encounters with the central black hole. I read recently that there's a new theory that the recent observation of a number of stars exiting the central volume at very high speed may be evidence for the previous existence of a second hole there, which was eaten by its bigger sibling about 100 million years ago.

It seems unlikely to me that stars in the central volume would develop planets, given the catastrophic (in both the mathematical and common senses of the word) gravitational dynamics of the place. Maybe further out, beyond a few thousand light years from the hole, where the radiation from the hole's accretion disk and the various kinds of death rattles of stars wouldn't be so problematic.

Yes, that's the one!

(I'd forgotten about the similarity to Mote in God's Eye, actually; I did remember that I was thinking of a short story, and the kicker of "Oh, well, if you can't or won't build us a launching laser...")

LOL.

"Which part of Clifton do you live on?"

"The part that doesn't eat."

"Oh no! Sheets of thin black vinyl! Helm, hard to zenith!"

That's almost certainly something that happens. There are other galaxies where the density of stars stops increasing as you go inward and becomes almost constant very close to the center (say, less than 100 light years from the center); one of the favorite explanations is that gravitational encounters with a binary binary hole ejected a lot of the stars that used to be there.

However, that will get you stars on extreme radial orbits (moving almost straight out from the center), and the nearby old, metal-rich stars that I'm aware of[*] are on moderately elliptical orbits, which rules out their having come from the vicinity of the central black hole.

[*] = I read a recent paper about them... not really my area of expertise.

On TV recently, I saw the Vincent Price film Master of the Universe (supposedly based on a combo of Verne's book of that title with Robur). When the better looking crewmen on the quasi-blimp airship were really getting down to business (e.g. releasing a bunch of anti-war pamphlets over London), they stripped off their striped "sailor" shirts.

If aliens were offering us free health care I think I, at least, would have noticed.

One a co-worker picked up the phone, gave my ex a puzzled look and told her, "You have the Emperor Zann calling on line one."

As to how Betty and Barney came to believe they'd been abducted:

Betty told her friends about seeing a UFO. She was worried that they'd been exposed to radiation; a friend told her that she could detect radiation on her car with an ordinary magnetic compass. She put a compass next to her car and the needle deviated, proving that the car was now radioactive.

She began to lecture to local UFO groups, retelling her story.

Betty started to have strange dreams about her UFO experience. These disturbed her enough that she sought psychiatric help. She and Barney discovered, through hypnotic regression, that they hadn't just seen a flying saucer, they'd actually been captured and subjected to weird medical experiments.

Others have covered the post-sighting events in a great deal of detail. I think I'm the first to actually drive down Route 3 north of the Notch at night and correlate what you can see there with the Hill Abduction case.

The believers assumed that the flying saucer was long gone so there was no need to go that far north. They concentrated on finding the location where Barney swung off onto a side road and saw the moon-shape, somewhere south of Indian Head. (They never did locate it.) The skeptics assumed that Jupiter was long gone so there was no need to go at all. Neither group considered that Betty and Barney's UFO might still be visible in the White Mountains.

Here's the rest of it:

The chapter continues with what they did during the day, and a recap of the previous twenty-odd pages as they discuss the events of the night before.

They remembered two distinct series of beeps. But the sandwich in between was puzzling to them. Betty, with the aid of a strong cup of coffee, could recall very faintly some of the things which had happened right after Indian Head. She could recall seeing a road marker that divided the towns of Lincoln and North Woodstock, but it was a flash, fragmentary impression. She could remember passing a store in the town of North Woodstock, again an isolated impression. Both recalled very faintly a large, luminous moon-shape, which seemed to be touching the road, sitting on end under some pines.

The actual moon set at 01:34 local time. At various points along Rt. 3, the road physically points north, south, west, east, and every direction in between. It's possible that the explanation for them to remember seeing a moon-shape touching the road is that they saw the moon, touching the road.

Betty, straining to remember, thought that Barney had made a sharp left turn from Route 3, but could not in any way identify where this might have been. When they had seen the moon-shaped object, Barney faintly recalled saying to Betty, “Oh, no, not again.” Betty recalls her reaction to Berney’s denial that it could have been an Unidentified Flying Object. She thought: That’s the way Barney is. If something frightens him, or he doesn’t like it, he just says to himself that it never happened. Barney, to a degree, will confess to this.

A brief digression to another source:
Here’s Betty talking:

We told them about the setting moon just before we turned on to the dirt road. They said we could not have seen the moon, for it had already set.

Sometime around 01:30 local time, then, they were already below the Notch. There's another possible object they may have seen: the Jack O'Lantern Resort in Woodstock which, at the time, had a large billboard with their logo (a stylized jack-o-lantern) down by the road. That would certainly appear to be a "large, luminous moon-shape, which seemed to be touching the road, sitting on end under some pines." This is well out of town; no other features are nearby.

Panic by both of us. So they suggested we take a road map, and pinpoint our location at different times. We knew we had left Colebrook about 10 PM, the restaurant there. We were able to pinpoint the locations and times most of the way, but at one point between Plymouth and Ashland was a blank. So they suggested we go back to this general area. Then we talked about time - we could drive to Canada in seven hours, and it had taken us seven hours to come home from Colebrook. There had to be an explanation.

The explanation is: Colebrook and Canada are ten miles apart. I think, though, that what she meant wasn’t “Canada,” but “Montreal.”

Another part of the explanation is that between Plymouth and Ashland there is nothing. It’s all unlighted fields and woods.

A third part of the explanation is that they stopped for unknown periods of unknown duration eight times (depending on what “several” means; I’m assuming “three”), and drove slowly for other portions of the trip, and got lost on a side road on another portion. They state explicitly that they drove slowly for one portion. It’s likely that they didn’t maintain speed in other portions, particular when they were feeling “groggy,” “sonambulistic,” and overcome by “drowsiness.”

By the time they reached home they’d been driving for around twenty-one hours. They’re lucky that being abducted by space aliens was the worst that happened to them: Others who’ve tried similar trips have run into trees.

Returning to Fuller….

Both agree they regained full consciousness at the sign on U.S. 93 which indicated that it was seventeen miles to Concord. Before that, one other recollection came to their minds: a fragmentary image of the darkened streets of Plymouth, a half a dozen miles north of Ashland, where the second series of beeps took place.

The chapter ends with Betty and Barney finally going to bed.

What do they remember south of Indian Head?

a) The Lincoln/Woodstock road marker
b) Downtown North Woodstock
c) (Possibly) the billboard for the Jack O'Lantern Golf Course & Resort in Woodstock
d) Downtown Plymouth
e) Downtown Ashland
f) Entering the superhighway
g) Concord
h) Portsmouth

In short, they remember every single town they passed through. The rest of the trip is past dark lakes, rivers, fields, and woods. I’ve driven that route more than once, and I don’t remember much more than that myself. Not only isn’t there any missing time, there aren’t any missing memories.

Finally, here’s your reward for sticking with me through this monster of a post: here’s an actual photo of the Flying Saucer that abducted Betty and Barney Hill. If you want to see it for yourself, you can drive down US 3 from Lancaster any clear night. It’s waiting for you.

The trick: feel around to see whether you're still in control of any of your muscles. True complete paralysis is less common than partial paralysis. For instance, paralysis of the extremities is common, so see whether you can move any of the muscles in your torso. If you can, do so. Movement wakes you up. You're trying to re-establish contact with the affected muscles, and moving or shaking them is often enough to do that.

If you're prone to frequent sleep paralysis, put some effort into seeing whether you have enough muscle control to whistle. If you can do that, teach your cohabitants that if you're apparently dead to the world but are audibly whistling, they're to come shake you awake.

If you're looking at sleep paralysis as a source of alien abduction experiences, you should also consider hypnagogic hallucinations. Like sleep paralysis, they can be brought on by sleep or REM deprivation, though they can also show up other times.

Really good hypnagogic hallucinations are wowsers. Think of it as going into REM sleep when you're awake and have your eyes open. You know how dreams will take sensory input from the real world and weave it into the dream? Hypnagogic hallucinations can do that with visual input. Long-legged roadside signs will pick up their poles and stalk across the road in front of you. The yellow stripes dividing the lanes from the shoulder strips will peel up as you approach, streaming diagonally past the windows of your car like endless ribbons. A pool of shadow on I-5 can turn into a giant trap door that falls open to reveal a bottomless fall into darkness.

Other hypnagogic hallucinations are sneakier. The contents of your memory can turn up in the supposedly waking world around you. I once had my car followed at close range by the memento mori Death out of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. On top of that, they can sometimes be touched or smelled, or have their own soundtrack. The really vivid full-sensorium ones are rare.

Hallucinations caused by sleep deprivation can be a moment's blip that briefly alters something you see, or a shift in the sounds you hear just as you're sliding into sleep.

I have my own theory about alien abductions, one that doesn't drag in elves or angels. I believe a lot of them are caused by chronic sleep deprivation. It's an extremely common condition. As a species, we've had almost no time to adjust to having bright artificial light on demand. Most of us don't get as much sleep as we should, or get our sleep on an appropriately regular schedule; and we take drugs, like caffeine, that can mess up our sleep cycles.

By the way, losing time is a symptom of sleep deprivation.

Note that there isn't a strict correlation between the amount of sleep lost and the hallucinations or other manifestations you may experience; but being chronically short on sleep makes you far more prone to having that happen. Note also how many reports of strange sightings and/or abductions happen at night, and happen when the supposed victims have been doing some boring repetitive task like driving in the dark on lightly traveled roads.

Why should these experiences take the form of aliens in flying saucers? Suggestion, I would guess. Images of big-eyed aliens, and roughly circular flying devices, have been around for a long time. The more aliens people see, the more likely people are to see aliens.

"Recovering memories" under hypnosis is a fast and effective way to generate memories that never existed. Hypnotists who aren't bought into the idea that memories recovered under hypnosis are necessarily true can do demonstrations of false memory generation that would curl your hair. You know how sometimes when you're dreaming, some loud noise or other alarming stimulus will wake you up, only before it wakes you up you weave it into the dreams you're having? That's the work of a second, and yet the dream that incorporates the stimulus can be fully fleshed out with a plot and numerous details.

That's how fast your brain can make stuff up. The speed at which "memories" are recalled under hypnosis is a stroll in the park by comparison. The trick isn't to pull up memories; it's to avoid prompting the subject to generate false ones.

You don't need hypnosis to have an alien contact experience. It just helps.

Anyway, that's my theory.

I think it's a money-maker. I'd go on that holiday trip. I want to see the light on the mountain, in the dark, from the various wide spots in the highway. I want to imagine imagining it is some mysterious Light in the Night Sky, moving inexplicably.

Yep, I'd pay for that. If, you know, box lunches or even light (gluten-free) snacks were provided throughout the evening (included in the price of the tour, of course).

I must say, much as I enjoy all the posts here, this one may be my favorite ever. Even better than the lolcat poetry.

You ride on a comfortable motor coach with low-light cameras mounted on the sides. Your money refunded if they don't find a moose!

They leave three times a week at 6:30 pm from the information booth in Gorham, May through October.

That would be a pretty awesome trip if the tour met up in, say, Concord (or got there from somewhere else), then drove into Vermont, north to the Canadian border, and looped back down (stopping in Colebrook for supper, of course) and dawdling long enough that it would be sufficiently dark by the time the OMG SCARY LIGHT IN THE SKY would be visible.

It's a shame I don't have a bus driver's license, I'd be all over this. It would be more interesting than secretarial temping...

Various people have suggested that the central part of the galaxy would be a dangerous place, but it's hard to quantify this well (partly because it's hard to be certain what would and wouldn't be dangerous for life; there are people who argue that mass extinctions are bad for evolving intelligent life, and other people who argue that they might promote more rapid evolution and diversification -- at least, as long as they're not happening every damn millenium...).

Still, I can think of four general problems:

1. The massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. I suspect this may not be that important for our galaxy, because we've got a relatively wimpy black hole, which means it isn't that energetic (throwing off x-rays and jets from the accretion disk) when it's active. Also, the peak activity was probably in the first few billion years of the universe, so that it's been pretty quiescent the last few billion years. You may not want to be within 100 light years of the center, but I'm not sure that things would be that bad 1000 ly away.

2. More frequent gravitational encounters between stars due to the higher density of stars. Close encounters with neighboring stars could (perhaps) mess up planetary orbits or (more likely) perturb the orbits of comets in the Oort Cloud, sending them crashing into the inner system. Close encounters like this are rare out in our part of the Galaxy (but they probably do happen); they'd be more common where there are more stars per cubic light year.

3. More frequent exposure to dangerous exotica, again because of the higher density of stars. Now you're worrying about rare things like supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and the like, which will probably be bad for people living within a hundred light years or so of the beastie. In a denser neighborhood, you're more likely to have something go off within a dangerous distance. (Supernovae are more common when you have young stars around, though, so if all the stars around you are old, they're less of a problem.)

4. Nuclear starbursts. (Or: "The center of the galaxy is where all the trash and loose change piles up.") If there's a merger with another galaxy (even just a dwarf galaxy or a near-miss fly-by), you'll end up with a lot of gas collecting in the center. This gas will compress, get dense, and form lots of new stars in a relatively short time (that's the "starburst"). And then (a few million years later) you get lots of extra supernovae.

Here's a paper and the accompanying summary/discussion from a few years back on the idea of "Galactic Habitable Zone". (It's in Science; I don't know if it's generally available or not.)

Not just likely: it's practically a certainty.

I've mostly been fortunate enough to work day shifts, but there was a brief period when I worked overnight shifts. I was coherent, but tired, driving home in the morning.

I felt in control of the car. I was driving the way I usually did, keeping my eyes on the road ahead and maintaining speed by reflex. I didn't realize until I glanced at the speedometer that I was actually going 10 mph below my usual speed on that road.

Fatigue slows your reflexes. You may not realize how slow you've become until you check yourself against an outside reference like the speedometer.

So I suspect Barney, driving all night in the dark after disrupted sleep schedules, with his wife constantly directing his attention to the sky, worried about plane crashes and being pursued, was maintaining a speed much less than his usual 50-55 mph. And if he didn't look at the speedometer, he'd never know.

I posted a longer response, or tried to, and the site blew up (<goofy>Hunh! Don't know my own strength!</goofy>) so, for fear it will end up double posting, I won't reproduce it here. I'll just say I have a subscription to "Science" and was able to retrieve that paper and I thank you very much for the link. The paper seems exactly on-point.

Good grief.

I used to have one of those $5 attachable clock temperature and compass things on the dashboard of my car. I gave up looking at it after I noticed that north was always toward the hood. Never thought it was the fault of radioactivity and space aliens, though. I suppose thinking that something in the car might be a magnetic source is just too mundane.

I was driving a station wagon full of sleeping committee members. Up ahead of me I could see a pulsing, shifting array of multicolored lights arranged in a pattern that was symmetrical top-to-bottom and side-to-side. It hovered near the highway, sometimes veering off to one side or the other.

Eventually it slowed down, and I got close enough to identify it: a big semi with an unusually large number of white, red, and amber reflectors attached to its rear. Their arrangement was bilaterally symmetrical, and the mirage-shimmer coming off the hot road at night was doubling it vertically. (Mirages are still there at night. You just can't see them unless you shine light on them.)

A more puzzling one showed up in the dark hours of the early morning when Patrick and I were driving across the Bonneville Salt Flats. The road is long and straight, and when it's dark there's nothing to either side of you. It's like one of those old arcade night driving simulators.

Way up ahead of us we could see a little dancing polymorphous red object. It never got much bigger or smaller, and its constantly morphing shape stayed within strict size limits, but it was pleasantly mysterious.

Eventually we figured out that we were on a slight downgrade, and were seeing the combined tail lights of all the cars for miles and miles in front of us.

The best extraterrestrial I ever sighted was huge for its class, burned with a distinctly greenish flame, had big chunks breaking off it, and tumbled slightly as it fell. I've seen a meteor shower that was more spectacular, but that was my best single meteor.

I have never seen real terrestrial or celestial objects in circumstances that suggested UFO sightings that were anywhere near as spectacular as the halucinations I've seen when I've driven too long and too late. The moral of the story is: get more sleep, and don't drive when you're tired.

Because it had too many of those pepperoni pizzas that Mary Aileen mentionned in #70?

Thanks, that paper is accessible with a free registration on the site, which I already had.

Maybe some kind of satellite? Or airplanes after all?

I've had a similar experience. It was a clear dark night in Cambridge, and I was looking at the night sky when suddenly around a dozen silver ellipsoids zoomed overhead in a V-formation. If I hadn't spent my formative years reading about all the classic explanations for UFOs, I would have taken them for mysterious craft moving incredibly quickly at a great height. Instead, thought "This must be a flock of geese," and sure enough, when I looked closely at the sides of these highly reflective ellipsoidal craft, I could see the stubs of wings, flapping vigorously. Had I not had this background in skeptical UFO studies, I would certainly have taken them as some kind of large, mysterious craft.

Well, it could have been migrating geese - that area's on the central flyway, although they don't usually go through that early in the fall. They get sandhill cranes, too, that spend the winter over toward Muleshoe. Avocets, ducks, possibly egrets or late-flying seagulls (they get around), maybe even white pelicans.

I'd bet on the rancher's identification, though.

The weirdest unexplained phenomenon I ever experienced was driving through Connecticut in the middle of the night with a friend--we had just passed through Mystic heading north on 95 towards Rhode Island, and from somewhere over the horizon (it appeared, at least), there was a sudden, huge burst of bright, bright green light, with what looked like a pretty definite single source, but bright enough to light up the entire sky. It lasted probably about a second, or at least a significant portion of one, and when it stopped all the streetlights had turned. I never found out what that was.

Not any more.

Possibly those were fighter planes in patrol formation. They often send out 2 or 3 planes to patrol a large orbit, 50 to 100 miles in diameter, spaced a few miles apart. In the year after 9/11 the Navy was running 2 F-14s nearly constantly in that pattern out of Whidbey Island in a circle from north of Seattle at one side down to Portland at the other. When I took my dog for a walk at night I'd see them go overhead, first one, then the other a minute or so later, about every 15 minutes. They'd go right over us because we live on the side of Council Crest, a high hill with the largest structure this side of Seattle: a rsdio tower about 1100 ft high (above the 900 ft. hill) with lots of lights on it. That tower makes an excellent navigation check: you can see it for a hundred miles.

Moral of the story: consider where you saw the lights in the sky; if there's a common landmark nearby you might be seeing patrol aircraft.

Meanwhile, here in New Mexico, a church's sign advertises a discussion about the End Times, to be held Oct 18 thru 21. Does that mean it all Ends on Oct 22?

I'm also wondering if I'm the only one who's wondering if I'm the only one who's wondering if I'm the only one.

I wonder.

Anyway, there are defined routes for civil aircraft and, while they keep their distance from the cumulo-granite, I can see a stranger easily getting excited by lights following identical paths across the sky.

Where I used to live, we were within a mile of the runway alignment of the local airport. Not a lot of planes, and low enough to be easily identified, but add a couple more miles of displacement, and the right lighting, and you could wonder.

Of course, having most of the RAF buzzing overhead since you were kneehigh to a grey Fergie tends to bias you towards aeronautical explanations. And on a good day, with the wind in the west, a Lightning departing Binbrook could be a bright dot of sunlight on aluminium, which seemed to hover over the Wolds before shooting straight upwards.

Then it disappeared entirely, which is something a satellite might do when entering the Earth's shadow, but no aircraft would just turn off all its lights, so what could it be?

I was heading home contemplating writing about this UFO when it flew over again on a reverse course. This time I was on a lit street, and the street lights showed it for what it was: a barn owl, flying silently about 20-30 feet up.

In the dark of the park, what I had seen were reflections of the distant sodium streetlights on the owl's white plumage, and it was much lower, smaller and slower than I imagined.

Much cooler, too. That's the first time I've seen one in the wild, and just yards from my house.

Since people have been discussing weird light(s), I'll mention the strange dawn we had in Prescott today. It's supposed to get stormy again after some overnight rain (hmm, it just started raining as I type, and it's *sunny*), but the clouds to the east weren't all that heavy. Nonetheless, a bit before sunup the sky seemed much lighter to the north-west and it looked more like early evening than morning. Definitely not a "sailor take warning" effect. I'm sure there's some natural explanation, but I don't think I've seen that kind of thing before -- and I see lots of dawns from the window next to this computer, which faces slightly north-east.

After all, for some people, the simple explanation doesn't fulfill their need for more meaning to their lives, unlike the modern version of encounters with the Sacred.

That's what I always see. I don't think warplane designers worry a lot about bright, multi-colored running lights; in combat I would think the pilot is going to turn all the lights off anyway (and pray to the gods of ECM that enemy radar doesn't spot him), and a good part of the time they're going to be running IFF transponders so the good guys know who they are and where.

Among other things: I've had the rising moon reported to me by a lookout as a nuclear explosion. The planet Venus reported as a helicopter (the person making the report continued to believe it was a helicopter even after I took a sight on it with my sextant, broke the sight, and laid down the line-of-position which crossed our track at the dead-reckoning time--of course, this was also the person who reported a tow-truck-and-tow on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel as a submarine running on the surface, so...).

For reasons I'm not entirely sure of (though I suspect it involves refraction), Sirius (the Dog Star) appears to flash red, green, and white. That gets reported as an aircraft a lot.

Binoculars, particularly if the lenses aren't entirely clean, the tubes aren't collimated, or one or the other side is a bit out of focus, or they aren't color-corrected, can add interesting effects on their own, even if you've got 'em on a solid rest. If you're holding them in your hand you get all that, plus jerky motion in your object. Estimating the size of something you're looking at through binoculars is also tricky even for folks who do it a lot.

Which was not surprising; he lived only a few miles away from the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency's missile and UAV test range at Aberporth...and the RAF training area attached to the Tactical Weapons School at Valley further north..

Regarding sleep, or the lack of it, I once travelled in one hook from Alice Springs to Sydney via Adelaide and Broken Hill on long distance buses, 40 or so hours in all and not a sodding wink. By the middle of New South Wales on the Barrier Highway I was seeing all sorts of things out of the corners of my eyes, and so wired I couldn't drink coffee. I would not have been a credible witness of anything.

Perhaps the Hills' regression under hypnosis went way too far?

No, wait...

Benny Hill?

ethan 192: [bursts into song]The Hills are alive...and they've been abducted...

This is from a WashPost column documenting the Paradigm Research Groups demand that the presidential candidates support an initiative to tell the truth about the aliens here on Earth. mmmhmmm

Being kind to your lookout, I'll assume he saw that "nuclear explosion" in the tropics, and he hadn't been there before. I've seen enough sun and moon rises near the equator to know that their light waxes more slowly than any nuclear weapon, and up in the higher latitudes it's even slower. It was a good thing there wasn't a lunar eclipse; if he was a Christian the red color might have made thiknk him that the end of the world had come, and he and all his shipmates had been sent to Hell with no reprieve.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

May your spiritual path never be probed by big-eyed extraterrestrials!

As one who has spent a lifetime caring for Dachshunds,* I cry foul. There is no way a Dachshund was on the floor, let alone happily. The proper place of a Dachshund in a moving car is on the driver's lap, front paws on the wheel**. From this position they both help to steer (usually in the direction of food) and keep an eye out for evil attack creatures (usually rodents) about whom all must be warned at top volume.

Now what could cause such unnatural behavior in a Dachshund? Was it fear? Perhaps he was already aware something was up, and was cowering in terror. Perhaps some lesser breeds would be so craven, but the Dachshund Standard states that Dachshunds are "courageous to the point of rashness," so we can dismiss this possibility out of hand.

Consider also that later on, it was Delsey's insistance on stopping that got the Hills out of their car and into position for contact to be made.

Putting these two facts together, we are led to the inescapable conclusion that Delsey was not a Dachshund, he was in fact an impostor. The real Delsey had been surreptitiously replaced by a shape-changing alien, charged with manouvering the Hill's into position for capture. So much now becomes clear! The mind-clouds when in his presence! The inexplicable behavior! The odd turnings of the car! The passive capitulation to their fates!

And what of the real Delsey? Knowing the command powers of the Dachshund, I feel no hesitation in declaring him to be, even now, cruising the galaxy, being hand-fed sweetmeats and morsels by legions of tummy-rubbing acolytes. I have no doubt that his story is one of curious interest, and great adventure, could we but come to know it.

*Not well, as they'll tell you. They're starving.

** Except for my mistreated Dachshunds. I force them to ride in a crate, which is secured to the frame of the car in a location outside the crumple zone. I make noises about safety, but they+ know I just want them to be miserable.

+The plural refers to my lifetime supply of dogs. I'm currently down to one. This is sad, and unnatural, and I'm working to rectify the situation.

A friend entertained me while I was sick last year by (among other things) showing me episodes from his DVD box set of the UFO series. Not too bad at all.

We only saw some of the Gerry Anderson series in Oz, so I don't recognise all of the examples people mentioned here. My fave was Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (poster) with its unseen villains — how can you have a schoolgirl crush on a puppet? People are strange.

But gullwing door cars, like the series, distinctly pre-date the 1980s Delorean, e.g. the Mercedes Benz 300L (some here) is from the 1950s.

The Zodiacal Light (or "false dawn") should appear in the east this time of year, so you've got me.

I can testify to "courageous to the point of rashness" too. My little longhair Phoebe (14 lbs.) used to charge at the local Bernese Mountain Dog (110+), making terroristic threats, every time she saw him. And my old geezer Linus tried to pick a fight with a half-grown pit bull in the vet's waiting room. Linus is not only small and arthritic, but has very few teeth. AND he's been beaten up by an off-leash Chow mix, so he knows what can happen when he's outclassed.

And there are plenty of homeless Dachshunds here.

For that matter, the glowing moon-like object touching the road between Woodstock and Plymouth could have been the billboard for the Jack O'Lantern Resort (a huge orange jack o'lantern). It's at about the right place, and the Jack O'Lantern has been in operation for 75 years. It's about the only thing that breaks the monotony on that stretch of road. I can't prove that the billboard was on Rt. 3 back in '61, though, and there's no possible way of telling whether it was what they saw at the time and only recalled months-to-years later.

At this late date, and with the written record being of memories recovered through hypnosis, who can tell?

The one on top of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta hotel? Because I've always thought that looked amazingly like a flying saucer.

Not the only one. I once spent an evening in (most likely) that very restaurant with friends from a professional conference. I probably shouldn't have finished off the evening with the brandy after all the wine and the scotch before-hand; as I walked out through the vestibule where the carousel meets the building proper, I was really afraid for a second or two that I was going to fall over and go rolling around the restaurant.

Bruce @215 giggle

mez @ 206 - oh, me too, I had a crush on Captain Scarlet (and can still sing most of the theme song). Captain Blue was Canadian, so I liked him too.

-Barbara

According to imdb.com, there was also a Captain Magenta.

Also, the Organization's airborne HQ was defended by three female fighter pilots code-named Melody, Harmony and Symphony. I wonder if their ranks included Cacophony and Littleditty.

Well, there were Corporals Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone; they always had a kind word for the perp in between swings of the lead pipe.

I seem to remember that in UFO there were three moon-based interceptors each armed with one missile. Even with the Submersible Aircraft Carrier etc., it seemed to me that a dozen saucers turning up at once would easily overwhelm the defences. Actually, I have a feeling that something like this happened in one episode. Must track it down again.

About Gerry Anderson's personnel... I wonder what Gordon did most of the time, considering that they didn't need Thunderbird Four that often. ("They hate me. They all hate me! That's why dad stuck me with the submarine duty.")

Again, I guess we must accept that aliens would have alien motivations. Maybe their goal is to fight a very, very protracted war of economic attrition (forcing the humans to spend lots of money and resources on planetary defense for an extremely long time), while for their part losing as many people as possible. Or maybe they're just biding their time until the moon explodes and goes rocketing out into space. Isn't that what the spinoff show is about?

Then, in 2063, Steve Zodiac, onboard the Fireball XL-5, finally catches up with the Moon and brings everyone back home.

Barney: And the evil face on the-- (He starts to say "leader.") He looks like a German Nazi. He's a Nazi... (There is a questioning tone in his voice.)

Doctor: He's a Nazi. Did he have on a uniform?

Barney: Yes.

The reality is a lot of people believe they have met aliens. It is a documentable mental phenomenon. There are hundreds of documented testimonies by people who really believe it happened to them.

The *explanation* is much more complex, but there is at least one pretty good guess. Going down a long tunnel towards a light, and being greeted there by people with big eyes and no facial features ("The Greys") who poke and prod you?

What's that but being born? Babies have consciousness, perhaps, much earlier than we realise, and the memories are embedded.

On the subject of USAF testing. My father's job at one point was to retrieve Royal Air Force antisubmarine weapons (secret) which had been accidentally dropped on peoples' houses or gardens along the coast, during testing. In those days the culture of the Official Secrets Act was widespread: people viewed it as part of their national duty *not* to blab.

There is no doubt the boffins test some pretty weird things.

Pravda reported on UFOs over Iran. Red and green lights, reversing directions. A couple crashed and destroyed themselves. It turned out it was US (or Israeli) pilotless drones, surveying air defence sites.

As one Iranian Air Force general was quoted 'it's standard US doctrine. They want us to turn on our radars so they can locate them. But they forget, we were all trained at Colorado Springs in the 1970s'.

One of the cases he reports as alien abduction is a hypnotic regression of a middle-aged man who reports that, when he was a teenager, one day he was levitated out of his car (without leaving a hole in the roof) by a large-breasted, blonde-haired, blue-eyed nude female space alien whose facial expression never changed, a young lady who (weird sexual experimentation!) masturbated him to orgasm before returning him. He never noticed at the time, and only recalled years later.

And my first thought wasn't "Woo! Those space aliens! I bet they were using it for genetic research!" My first thought was "I wonder what Miss November looked like that year?"

Oh yeah! I'd travel into town to do this. Someone make this happen?

Solo, about the longest I'm willing to do is 8 hours. I can go over that but then I'm cutting into my safety margin for function. I'm a morning person, so me driving late at night is Not The World's Best Plan. And on a solo trip, rest breaks are usually double what I'd do with other drivers to spell me. If I'm not in good shape, they can triple or quadruple. This knocks my average speed down hard, and speeding does almost nothing to bring it up. If I want to go faster, a second driver to spell me makes the biggest difference... and more than doubles the potential drive time.

Barney and Betty Hill's trip wouldn't have been anywhere *near* as exciting if they'd swapped driving. Pulling over into a scenic overlook for an hour or two of nap wouldn't have hurt either.

It's probably a recovered memory; I was usually short on sleep at the time I watched UFO.

I remember Terrahawks from what must have been the first time round, although mostly I remember the noughts and crosses ending, one episode when Cy-star has a baby and fighting with my brother during the boring bits (whenever people were talking generally).

Neil #238: Maybe the mass invasion episode you remember was really just a light on a distant mountain. Or maybe it's on the last disc of the DVD set. Or swamp gas.

re UFO

In the episode where the aliens are building a dome underneath the sea, they are also building up to a mass attack, flying saucers hovering just out of defence range.

Straker isn't clear why, but does say 'they'd lose half of them before they reached the atmosphere'. Implying Earth has more defence resources than 3 interceptors.

The general tack of the series, though, is that the aliens are from a dying planet, and operating at the very limits of their range. Rather as if we were exploring Alpha Centauri using Apollo capsules. And so their attacks are pinprick or covert.

Ethan. The order of release of episodes of UFO is different in the US and UK editions. Amazon (.co.uk or .com) had a good explanation under the reviews section.

What frightens me is I haven't seen that episode in 30 years and yet I remember it so clearly.

The last few episodes really played up the paranoia element, and were particularly good.

Anyone remember the TV series The Invaders?

Keith Laumer did a particularly good novelisation of the first couple of episodes.

Thunderbirds is, by consensus, the best Gerry Anderson series.

one hour (Captain Scarlet was only 30 minutes). Best animation.

The theme of the series was very modern: environmental disaster, etc. The episodes have mostly aged pretty well-- skyscrapers on fire, nuclear plant meltdowns etc. Memorable characters: Lady Penelope and Parker. Scott's (?) unrequitted love for the Japanese girl. Brains.

And there was the wonderful theme song. There is (still) a great movie to be made of that franchise, which speaks to our very modern fear of terror and disaster, and of raw human courage. If George Clooney couldn't kill the Batman franchise, maybe Thunderbirds can live again.

http://www.andrewdawson.info/thunderbirds_fab.html

Thunderbirds FAB was a very successful stage show which ran in London. The critics didn't like it, but the audiences loved it.

Oh yes. It was much better than the dreadful(*) TV movie of about 10 years ago, with Scott Bakula as the main character. By the way, did you know that Philip K. Dick was a fan of the show? If not, does that shock you?

(*) See, ethan, I do have some standards where it comes to TV and movies.

If you liked 'the Invaders' you might really like 'the Delta State'. Animated series about a group of young people (origins mysterious, even to them) who are fighting a psychic battle with alien invaders (from another dimension?). The series was French, originally, I think, and has that style. Episodes are ambiguous, at times, and mysteries are created and not resolved.

Whether you want to engage in this trade I'm leaving to your own ethical decision.

(Actually a friend of mine had this video, so we had to do the "dance" when Stingray came on and we were at his house)

* with two girlfriends, which is one more than the entire set of Tracey brothers, and ten times the dramatic potential.

I especially enjoyed the episode where Our Heroes are waiting for the Moon to rise before they launch. And they wait and wait and wait, until they hear reports that our satellite is way away in space. You see, those mean aliens from planet Magneton have been focusing their planet's awesome magnetic field on our Moon. Of course, Our Heres get the Moon back in place before the story is over. Not sure how, but who cares?

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore
Bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling
And you'll sing "Vita Bella"
Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay
Like a gay tarantella

Tying back into the thread, she had a part in two episodes in the first season of U.F.O. (scripts here) as 'Miss Holland', who sounds like a variation of Miss Moneypenny, whom she portrayed before and after that role.

The top of Cannon Mountain from Rt. 3 in the Notch (warning: big)

A closer view of the top of Cannon Mountain

Same view, with the parts (Lookout Tower and Tramway) labeled

I suspected that some light source had been their "alien ship." As you note the moon and other planets don't fit the time line.

Barney's sketch of the alien matches the alien from an Outer Limits episode that aired a week or so before the hypnosis interview when he drew it. The Bellero Shield was that episode.

Barney was a postal worker having trouble with what Betty described as psychosomatic complaints. He is said to have had an ulcer from stress before the "alien encounter."

That suggests he had a work situation that allowed Subliminal Distraction exposure. My site is a five-year investigation of SD. I plan to place a link to this page when I begin to re-edit the Barney and Betty Hill page on my site.

A family member who emailed me said he was always an outdoor worker and never worked in the building. But low exposure while sorting and preparing his route mail, would cause this problem but prevent the sudden dissociative episode usually seen with this phenomenon, Subliminal Distraction.

You may use any information from my site.

John Harrigan, former publisher of the Coös County Democrat, tells me that the waitress who served Betty and Barney their hamburger-and-cake was named Ruby Beecher.

When I was 18, I moved from El Paso, TX to Cleveland, OH via car. Being naive (I said I was 18), I expected to be able to drive nearly straight through and tackle this in a day, maybe a day and a half. Taking a detour through (appropriately enough) Roswell did nothing to help my transit time, and at the end of the second day, I found myself in St. Louis.

I planned to sleep at a friend's house there, but then I met a cute girl and ended up spending the night trying to spend the night with her. When that didn't meet with any success, I went back on my way. I was stopped just outside St. Louis for swerving to make a freeway junction at the last moment. Once the state policeman was convinced that I was merely tired and had not been attending the Phish concert the night before, he sent me on my way with a suggestion that I get some sleep soon. I did catch a few hours' sleep after breaking down in Greenville, IL, while waiting for my car to be fixed, but that didn't last long and I was soon back on the road.

By the time I reached Indianapolis, I was completely fried. I needed sleep badly, but I wanted to keep pushing, so I stopped and grabbed some more No-Doz and kept on.

Finally, I ended up pulling off into a truck stop parking lot, barely conscious of what I was doing, and catching a nap. The reason: a scary little incident where I'd glanced at my clock, blinked, and glanced at the clock again. The only problem was that the clock read about an hour later the second time. I doubt VERY sincerely that I was actually asleep for that hour while behind the wheel on a busy freeway, but I sure couldn't tell you with any confidence exactly what I was doing. Even days later, my memories of that stretch of the trip were sketchy at best. The only two things I remember about the greater Indianapolis area are seeing people imitate IRL on the freeway by passing at 100MPH on the freeway, and napping in the driver's seat at a truck stop, hoping I'd found my way to a real parking space, since I wasn't even entirely sure of that.

The point of this rather long-winded story: Endless hours of driving plus lack of sleep make an easy recipe for the phenomenon some call highway hypnosis. Recalling my state of mind at this point in the trip, I'm sure I would've been freaking-out-paranoid about the weird light following me, too, and I sure as heck don't remember substantial portions of the drive.

It's been covered a bit already in the comments, it seems, but another two cents can't hurt.

This is the Stan Romanek tape, only now coming to light five years after it was shot. Elsewhere we learn that "An instructor at the Colorado Film School in Denver scrutinized the video ‘‘very carefully’’ and determined it was authentic, [Jeff] Peckman said."

Jeff Peckman wants to have the Denver City Council to have an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission. He's got a ballot initiative to that effect.

What the fellow from the Denver film school determined was that the tape was shot on the kind of camera that Stan claims it was, not that the thing seen on it is authentically a space alien.

Why do I think that this is BS? Because the space alien looks just like a Betty-and-Barney-Hill space alien, and it would be a pretty incredible coincidence if what they described and genuine space aliens looked the same.

More stories.

The answer is, Yes. That was Hurricane Esther.

There was a hurricane watch from Cape May, NJ, to the Massachusetts coast on 19 September.

Indeed there has been. But an "Unidentified Flying Object" is just that -- Unidentified. All it means is that the observer couldn't tell what it was, not that it's been definitively identified as an alien spacecraft.

I would suggest, however, that she see section 107 of US copyright law, "Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use". It's online at various places, including here.

If she'd like to argue that the noncommercial use of quotations from 2 pages of a 300-page book for the purpose of commentary and criticism does not qualify as fair use, she's welcome to try to make the argument, based on the criteria given in section 107. A simple word count won't suffice, though; the fair use provisions do not specify a particular word limit.

Really?

I believe my quote was fair use, a brief excerpt for the purpose criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

I've retained my commentary.

Ms. Marden's real objection, of course, is that this article totally blows the "abducted by aliens" theory out of the water. The Hills saw a light on a mountain top, and either the moon or the billboard for the Jack O'Lantern resort, which fatigue turned into a spaceship.

I'm sorry about that, Ms. Marden, but if you want to see the "UFO" that "abducted" your aunt, all you need to do is drive down US Route 3 any clear night.

Courtesy to authors is usually a good thing, I say.

On March 7, 1964, Dr. Simon probed Betty’s detailed memory of her trip [...]

North of Lancaster, near Groveton, Betty observed a star below the moon on the lower left-hand side.

Moments south of Lancaster, she noticed there was a bigger star up above this one that had not previously been there. She pointed it out to Barney, and continued to watch it as it seemed to grow bigger and brighter.

In 1961, the Hills told NICAP’s Walter Webb that it first appeared to be a falling star—only it fell upward.

In 1976, skeptic Robert Sheaffer suggested that Betty and Barney, in all probability, observed the planets Jupiter and Saturn—not a UFO. [...] However, [...] Betty described two bright objects to the left of the moon, whereas Saturn was positioned below and to the right of the moon. Nor did he offer an explanation for the object’s apparent motion and expanding size.

If you retain the replies you have to these quotes (you can tack on the "Have no fear..." reply to the end of your reply to the last quote), include some paraphrases in your own words of other assertions you want to respond to, and add any additional scene-setting that seems necessary for the more parsimonious quotation, then this passage should still be understandable and useful even with only the 150 words quoted above.

The analysis of the account in Fuller's book, on the other hand, really requires more than 150 words of quotation, and there's no reason under copyright law that you shouldn't be able to quote more than that as needed to make your points.

I removed the text as a courtesy to a living author. It was not vital to making my case. The only reason for quoting you at all was to show that this is not a dusty memory from the nineteen sixties, but a still-controversial case--which I have now solved.

If you're interested in the most likely explanation for why their watches stopped: Their schedules were so disrupted that they forgot to wind them. Based on Fuller's account it's likely that their watches had already stopped some time before they reached Twin Mountain.

"About midnight on September 20th, we were driving in the National Forest Area in the White Mountains, in N.H. This is a desolate, uninhabited area. At first we noticed a bright object in the sky which seemed to be moving rapidly. We stopped our car and got out to observe it more closely with our binoculars. Suddenly it reversed its flight from the north to the southwest and appeared to be flying in a very erratic flight pattern. As we continued driving and then stopping to watch it, we observed the following flight pattern: the object was spinning and appeared to be lighted on only one side which gave it a twinkling effect. As it approached our car, we stopped again. As it hovered in the air in front of us it appeared to be pancake in shape, ringed with windows in the front through which we could see brilliant blue-white lights. Suddenly, two red lights appeared on each side. By this time my husband was standing in the road, watching closely. He saw wings protrude from each side and the red lights were on the wing tips. 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 was shocked and got back into 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. At this time we are searching for any clue that might be helpful to my husband, in recalling what he saw that caused him to panic. His mind is 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 engine plane, its flight was noiseless and the lighting of the interior did not reflect on the ground."

I hope this adds some clarification concerning the events at the field and Betty's position seated in the vehicle, not scurrying around the field.

Any future account you make of this case will have to explain why what they saw wasn't the light on the lookout tower.

*gets popcorn*

I wonder if KM had a signed release to quote the passage (more than 150 words) she quotes at #292? If so and the passage appears in her book, I wonder if she'll come back and tell Jim he's "in violation of copyright" because it's on his blog, even though she posted it there? It would be of a piece with her other "logic."

Kathleen, it might help if you cited sources for any of the claims in #295 (other than your book, which is not a credible source for backing up your own claims,* and which I'm dramatically less inclined to purchase than I was before your cheap, tacky "you're in violation of copyright" trick). Is the "NICAP report" available online? If not, where can it be obtained?

The other four assertions are claimed to be statements by the Rubbles Hills. Documented where?

*This is a general principle: Can't cite Cicero to corroborate Cicero. The fact that you have a clear interest in keeping the Hills' "abduction" from being debunked makes you still less credible, but is not strictly relevant here.

Were the watches checked by a watchmaker or a repairman? Had they been overwound? (Easy to do; I've done it myself. Without realizing it, too.)
'Permanently broken' doesn't require UFOs as an explanation.

My book, which was the culmination of 15 years research and investigation, was vetted for accuracy by several scientists. Sometimes it becomes apparent that my attempts to elucidate writers who have posted inaccurate information is not appreciated. However, those who wish to present historically accurate information are often grateful for my assistance. Occasionally my generosity is met by ad hominem attacks and gossipy speculation, even bullying, as has occurred in some recent posts. (In reality, notification of copyright infringement is what brought me to this site.)

There is ample reason to be skeptical about some aspects of the Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction, especially regarding some of Betty’s statements that are identical to her dream account. Although the Hills’ UFO encounter provided an abundance of forensic evidence, only Betty’s dress underwent scientific laboratory analysis. My comparative analysis of the hypnosis tapes vis-à-vis Betty’s infamous “Dreams of Recall?” account provides correlating data that is clearly amenable within the framework of social science. It is apparent that “something” anomalous happened to Betty and Barney Hill on September 19-20, 1961.
If you wish to research the Betty and Barney Hill UFO incident, their two archival collections (civil rights and UFO) are located at the University of New Hampshire. I would also recommend that you drive along US Route 3 from Lancaster to North Woodstock on a bright, starry late September evening, keeping in mind the fact that this event occurred 48 years ago. With that thought I bid you farewell.

2) Sleep deprivation (and this is documented many places) can cause a) visual hallucinations, and b) a sense of "lost time."

3) The Hills saw some very odd things, and had a sense of lost time.

4) The simplest explanation is ... ?

I believe that my solution to this case is correct.

BTW, there is a small airfield in Franconia. It's a grass strip, popular with glider pilots. It too would have been between the Mt. Cleveland rest area and the moon.

(Xopher: Ms. Marden is Betty Hill's niece.)

False copyright-takedown notifications push my buttons, especially when I'm convinced the author would have no such objection to being quoted equally extensively in a blog post that agreed with her conclusions.

This is incorrect. The made for TV movie was called "The UFO Incident".