Betty and Barney Hill — Dr. Benjamin Simon and the Hypnotic Regressions
| Incident Name: | Betty and Barney Hill Abduction Case |
|---|---|
| Incident Date: | September 19, 1961 |
| Location: | White Mountains section of U.S. Route 3 |
| State/Provence: | New Hampshire |
| City/Town : | south of Lancaster and Colebrook |
| Country : | USA |
| Shape : | Disc Shape |
| Alien Race : | Greys |
| Longitude : | September 19, 1961 |
| Case Files : | Betty and Barney Hill Case File |
Betty and Barney Hill — Dr. Benjamin Simon and the Hypnotic Regressions
[edit | edit source]Dr. Benjamin Simon: Background
[edit | edit source]| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Full name | Dr. Benjamin Simon, MD |
| Location of practice | Boston, Massachusetts (Back Bay) |
| Specialization | Psychiatry; neurology; hypnotherapy |
| Military connection | Chief of Neuropsychiatry and Psychiatry, Mason General Hospital; treated thousands of combat trauma cases in WWII using hypnosis |
| Published works | "Hypnosis in the Treatment of Military Neurosis," Psychiatric Opinion (1967) |
| Reputation | One of the most skilled clinical hypnotherapists in the United States in the 1960s |
| Prior UFO interest | None; skeptical; took the case purely for the psychological and therapeutic challenge |
| Conclusion on the Hills' case | Betty's dreams generated the abduction narrative; hypnosis elaborated rather than recovered memory |
Dr. Simon came to the Hill case without any prior interest in or sympathy for the UFO subject. He was a clinician who specialized in trauma — specifically the use of hypnotherapy to treat wartime psychological injury. He agreed to see the Hills because Barney's deteriorating health clearly had a psychological component, and the mystery of the missing time seemed like a tractable clinical problem.
The Therapeutic Relationship
[edit | edit source]Simon first met with the Hills on December 14, 1963. After initial evaluation sessions, he began formal hypnotic regression on January 4, 1964. From that date through June 1964 — approximately seven months — he conducted weekly sessions with Betty and Barney separately, ensuring that neither could hear the other's session material until Simon chose to reveal it.
Every session was audio-recorded on tape. These recordings represent the primary source document for the Hills' abduction accounts and are preserved in the Hill Collection at UNH.
Methodology
[edit | edit source]Simon's methodology was rigorous and standard for clinical hypnotherapy of the era:
- Separate sessions: Betty and Barney were hypnotized independently; they did not know each other's session content
- Posthypnotic amnesia: Simon typically implanted a suggestion that the subject would not remember the content of the session until he removed the amnesia — preventing them from consciously processing or discussing session material between appointments
- Non-leading questions: Simon's questioning approach was designed to elicit narrative rather than to suggest content
- Confrontation session: Near the end of the series, Simon conducted a session in which he played each subject's recordings to the other for the first time; he observed their reactions carefully
The Abduction Narratives
[edit | edit source]Under hypnosis, both Betty and Barney produced detailed accounts of being taken aboard a craft by humanoid beings and subjected to medical examinations. The broad strokes of their accounts were consistent — the same sequence of events in approximately the same location, the same general physical environment, the same medical examination themes.
The specific details diverged in ways that Simon found significant: the beings looked different in each account, specific procedural details differed, and some events appeared in different sequences. Simon interpreted these divergences as consistent with confabulation from a shared dream source rather than independent recall of identical shared experience.
Simon's Conclusion
[edit | edit source]Simon concluded, and published in the journal Psychiatric Opinion (1967), that:
- The Hills had genuinely experienced something that caused them anxiety and trauma — he did not dismiss their distress as invented
- The most parsimonious explanation was that Betty's vivid dreams had created a detailed abduction narrative
- Barney, who had heard Betty's dreams repeatedly, had absorbed this narrative and it had structured his own hypnotic recall
- Hypnosis had elaborated on the dream content rather than recovering suppressed genuine memory of an abduction
- He found no evidence under hypnosis of deliberate fabrication — both Hills believed their accounts were true
Simon was careful to distinguish between deliberate deception (which he did not believe) and confabulation in good faith (which he did). He remained convinced that something unusual had occurred on the night of September 19 — he simply believed the most likely explanation was psychological.
The Tapes
[edit | edit source]The original audio recordings of the hypnosis sessions are among the most significant primary source documents in UFO research history. They capture the Hills' accounts in their own words, in real time, before any editorial process. Portions of these tapes were published in John Fuller's The Interrupted Journey (1966) and have been referenced by researchers ever since. The complete tapes are preserved at the University of New Hampshire.
