The Hill Incident: America's First Documented Alien Abduction

On the night of September nineteenth, nineteen sixty-one, Barney and Betty Hill were driving south on Route Three through this stretch of the White Mountains, heading home to Portsmouth from a belated honeymoon in Montreal. Somewhere near Lincoln, in the dark between the peaks, their drive took a turn that neither of them could fully explain.

They noticed a bright object in the sky that seemed to follow them. When Barney pulled over for a closer look through binoculars, he later said he could see figures behind lit panels of a craft hovering just above the treetops. He ran back to the car, drove off in panic, and then, as best as they could piece together, roughly two hours of time vanished. They arrived home with their watches stopped, their luggage disarranged, and a vague, unshakable feeling that something had happened to them between the mountains.

The Hills reported the sighting to Pease Air Force Base within days. Under hypnosis with a Boston psychiatrist two years later, they described, independently, matching accounts of being taken aboard a craft and examined. Those accounts became, after the story leaked to the Boston Traveler in nineteen sixty-five, the most widely documented and widely debated alien abduction case in American history.

What is often lost in the UFO mythology is who the Hills were. Barney was Black, Betty was white. They were an interracial couple in an era when that still carried enormous risk, and both were active civil rights workers. Barney served on a local board of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and was a significant figure in New Hampshire's NAACP. Historians who have studied the case closely note that the experience, whatever its source, collided with their deepest anxieties about surveillance, examination, and being subject to forces beyond their control.

In twenty eleven, on the fiftieth anniversary, New Hampshire erected a historical marker on Route Three near Lincoln. It may be the only state historical marker in the country dedicated to an alien encounter.