Betty and Barney Hill abduction

On the night of 19–20 September 1961, Barney Hill, a postal worker, and Betty Hill, a social worker, both civil-rights activists from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were driving home from a holiday when they reported a bright, erratically moving craft following their car through the White Mountains, near Lancaster. Barney later said the beings he glimpsed were "somehow not human". In interviews with NICAP investigators that November, the couple realised the drive had taken about seven hours instead of four.

In 1964 the psychiatrist Benjamin Simon hypnotised them separately; both then described being taken aboard and examined. Simon himself concluded the abduction story was most likely a "singular psychological aberration" rather than a real event. Betty drew a "star map" she said she had been shown, which Marjorie Fish later (1968) proposed matched the Zeta Reticuli system; Carl Sagan and others disputed the match. John G. Fuller's book The Interrupted Journey (1966) made the case widely known.

The Air Force's Blue Book file carries the original sighting as insufficient data, blames a temperature inversion for the radar return and the light, and later calls the object "in all probability Jupiter". Other sceptical explanations include fatigue and memories shaped under hypnosis.

Sources: Project Blue Book file, Lincoln NH, Sept 1961 (NARA 28994660) · Wikipedia