MUFOB ARCHIVE/01 UFO Documentary
John Harney
From Merseyside UFO Bulletin volume 1, number 3. May-June 1968
On May 9th, (1968) BBC Television presented a documentary programme on UFOs narrated by Dr Stephen Black, a researcher in neuro-physiology. For this programme Dr Black chose only UFO witnesses he believed to be sincere. He soon revealed the peculiar subjective aspects of UFO sightings. First was Captain Howard concerning the famous sighting made by himself, his crew and passengers from a BOAC airliner on June 29th. 1954.
When Howard had told his story Dr Black asked him how he felt at the time. Howard said that he felt “kindly disposed towards them.” He said he discussed it with other members of his crew afterwards and they agreed that they felt “some sort of bond of affection between us and ‘them’.” Captain Howard described it as a “very strange and powerful feeling”.
Another fascinating interview was with Lonnie Zamora of Socorro, followed by a conversation between Dr Black and Dr Hynek. Both agreed that Zamora saw what he said he saw, Dr Hyneksaid that it was one of the most interesting cases he had come across. There followed an interview with Joe Simonton (the Eagle River case) who claimed to have received four pancakes from spacemen in a flying saucer in exchange for a jug of water. Simonton was “not lying.”
Then we were shown engineer Brian Winder lecturing to a joint meeting of the British Interplanetary Society and Royal Aeronautical Society, at Bristol on the subject of his flying saucer model based on an atomic power source, The camera, also showed us his audience, some listening attentively, others smirking.
We were shown Dr William Hartman an astronomer who is responsible for the investigation of all photographic evidence for the Condon Committee attempting to duplicate the famous Heflin photographs. Hartman pointed out the difficulty of obtaining acceptable photographic evidence, If any particular photograph could be duplicated by faking, then this weakened the arguments in favour of the genuineness of that photograph. He compared the situation to the assassination of President Kennedy, for which event there were many eyewitnesses, photographs and physical evidence, such as bullets, etc, In spite of all this people still argue as to exactly what happened and who really fired the shots, and many of books have been written expounding contradictory thc:ories. Rex Heflin revealed that he was a keen model maker and Dr Black commented that it was quite possible to fake a photograph and then forget about it.
The most significant part of the programme was the discussion of the Betty and Barney Hill ‘abduction’ story. Dr Benjamin Simon, the Boston psychiatrist who examined the Hills, said that he was at first very puzzled by the story. Both gave the same story under hypnosis and Betty described her alleged abduction in great, detail. Dr Simon was baffled until he recognised. the dreamlike quality of the story. In dreams such things can exist, be acceptable and not require a diagnoses of mental disorder. This led him to recall that Betty’s original problem had been nightmarish dreams. It turned out that these dreams and the dreams which she had written down in 1961 (just after their UFO experience) were all the same. Simon felt pretty convinced that the abduction part of the story, at least, was merely a dream.
Betty denied telling these dreams to Barney and Barney denied being told about them. However, Betty admitted telling the dreams to her supervisor and her sister and it finally emerged that Barney had been at home at the time she was talking about the dreams, so that he could have absorbed some of the details without realising it. A suggestion by Betty’s supervisor that they might not be dreams but reality led to the complete repression of the whole thing, leading to the gap in memory. Dr Simon said, in answer to a question from Dr Black that both of the Hills were deep trance hypnotic subjects.
Summing up, Black said that a lot of apparent movement of lights in the sky might be due to a well-known mechanism in the brain which makes a flickering light in a darkened room appear to move. The eyeballs remain still, the movement is “all in the mind’. Some scientists believe the rate of flicker to be critical and this rate has to be the same as an importantbrain-wave rhythm – about ten times a second. Stars sometimes twinkle at the rate of ten times a second and the hill’s experience with their attention being drawn to what appeared to be a star. However, stars never seem to move as much as UFOs are said to move.
Barney Hill has said that he did not believe in flying saucers, but Betty did, so to some extent suggestion was going on in their home. Both the Hills are deep-trance hypnotic subjects, and such people are only 5% of the general population. Dr Black said that we wished to test as many convincing UFO witnesses as possible for hypnotizability. this was somewhat difficult to arrange, but only six deep-trance UFO witnesses in succession would be necessary to prove statistically a connection between the two phenomena. So far, he had five such subjects and the odds against that being due to chance were three million to one against. Dr Hynek agreed that this discovery was very interesting and required following up.
Dr Black said that deep-trance hypnotic subjects, so far as we know, do not hallucinate spontaneously; they need a hypnotist to suggest at least the beginnings of the delusion. He then asked: “Could flickering light, the way people react in groups and hypnosis all combine to explain UFOs?” He concluded that perhaps some, though certainly not all sightings could be explained in this way. The Captain Howard sighting could not be explained as a delusion as such an explanation in this case would surely involve telepathy!
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