The Hill Hypnosis Tapes: A Journey Into Missing Time
Every Saturday morning in early 1964, Betty and Barney Hill drove to Boston to be hypnotized.
Then they drove home, unable to remember a word of what they’d said.
That wasn’t a glitch. It was the plan, and it’s how the famous Hill hypnosis tapes got made.
Those tapes are the reason the world remembers the Hills as abductees rather than as a couple who saw a weird light. But they were recorded more than two years after the drive they describe.
So what happened in between? And what did the man holding the microphone actually make of it all?
To answer that, go back to the night before any of the tapes existed.
A Drive That Took Two Hours Too Long
On the night of September 19, 1961, the Hills were driving home to Portsmouth from a trip to Montreal, with their dog, Delsey, along for the ride. It was late, and Route 3 through the White Mountains was nearly empty.
Betty noticed a bright light near the moon that didn’t behave like a star. It seemed to move, and the farther they drove, the closer it looked.
They pulled over more than once to check it with binoculars. Barney kept reaching for ordinary explanations, like a plane or a satellite, and the light kept refusing to act like one.
Then, near Indian Head, a rock profile on a mountainside beside Route 3 in Lincoln, the object dropped low over the road. Barney got out and walked toward it with the binoculars.
Through the lenses, he saw figures watching him from the windows of a craft. He panicked and ran back to the car, sure he was about to be captured.
- Scan a broad view with 8x magnification that is manageable for handheld observing
- See more detail in distant subjects through fully multi-coated optics
- Take them outdoors in changeable weather with a waterproof, fog-resistant housing
They drove on, heard a series of beeps, and reached Portsmouth around dawn.
And they told people right away. Betty called Pease Air Force Base two days later, then wrote to a civilian UFO group called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or NICAP.
NICAP sent Walter Webb, a Boston astronomer, to hear the story for himself. He sat down with the Hills on October 21, 1961, about a month after the drive, and the interview ran for hours.
Those first reports still exist, from the Air Force file to Webb’s write-up, and you can read them on the Hill family’s official site. They describe the light, the figures in the windows, and Barney’s panic.
They don’t describe an abduction, because at that point there wasn’t one to tell. They don’t mention any missing time, either, because the Hills hadn’t noticed it yet.
On November 25, 1961, two men from an electronics company who had read Webb’s report came to the house with a simple question: how long did the drive take?
Barney did the math out loud. They’d left Colebrook at 10:05 p.m. for a trip of under four hours, yet they’d gotten home close to 5 a.m.
Neither of them could remember much of the 35 miles between Indian Head and Ashland, either.
Two hours were missing, and nobody in that living room could explain where they went. Betty, though, already had an idea.
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Betty’s Dreams Fill the Gap
The dreams had started about ten days after the drive, five nights in a row. In them, the car was stopped on the road, and she and Barney were led into a craft, examined by small beings, and shown a map of stars.
She wrote them down as notes to herself.
For the next two years, those notes were the only detailed account of the missing hours. The Hills told the story only to close friends, plus one small UFO study group in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Nobody at that meeting mentioned the tape recorder running in the room. Remember that detail, because it comes back later.
None of this is what finally put the Hills in a psychiatrist’s office, though. Barney’s health did.
Anxiety, high blood pressure, and ulcers sent him to a psychiatrist in Exeter in the summer of 1962. For a year, the incident at Indian Head barely came up.
That doctor eventually referred him to Benjamin Simon, a Boston psychiatrist who had used hypnosis for years.
On December 14, 1963, the Hills drove to Simon’s office on Bay State Road for a consultation. He proposed using hypnosis to open what he called the locked room of their amnesia.
One Patient at a Time, and No Peeking
Simon built the sessions to keep the two stories apart.
He always hypnotized Betty and Barney separately. Neither ever heard what the other one said in the chair.
He instructed each of them to remember nothing of what they said unless he allowed it, and he reinstated that amnesia at the end of every session. That way the couple couldn’t swap stories over dinner and blur two accounts into one.
And a tape recorder ran through all of it.
After several practice sessions, Barney went first, on February 22, 1964. Simon walked him back to the night on Route 3.
Barney relived the figures at the windows and the fear. But he described being taken from the car only in vague, frightened fragments.
Then it was Betty’s turn. Her account was longer and far more detailed, with the walk through the woods, the examination aboard the craft, and the map.
It also followed her dreams closely. Simon noticed.
At first he’d assumed that if this was fantasy, it had started with Barney and spread to Betty. After Betty’s second trance, he flipped that around.
By March 21, he was testing the opposite idea: maybe Betty’s dreams had been absorbed by Barney, who seemed the more suggestible of the two.
Simon also asked Betty, after one session, to draw the map without thinking about it. That 1964 sketch, now in the University of New Hampshire’s collection, became the star map that would keep the case alive for decades.
The Day They Finally Heard the Tapes
Through all of this, the tapes were a mystery to the two people on them.
Simon had promised they’d get to hear the recordings when the time was right, so the whole experience could come back in one piece instead of in flashes.
On April 5, 1964, hoping that day had come, they left Portsmouth at 6:15 instead of the usual 6:45. They killed time over coffee and doughnuts near the office.
Betty finished hers. Barney barely touched his.
The playbacks began that spring and filled the remaining sessions. And they helped.
“When we got to the end of the tapes,” Barney said later, “I had an overwhelming sense of relief, a feeling of unburdening.” His blood pressure and ulcers eased, and both Hills were calmer than before.
But relief isn’t the same as an answer. When the treatment ended on June 27, 1964, the three people in that office had three different verdicts.
Three Verdicts in One Room
Betty was sure. To her, hypnosis had shown that her dreams were a memory of something real.
Barney could no longer tell a hypnotic memory from a real one. Once the amnesia lifted, what he’d said under hypnosis felt no different from anything else he remembered, and the night now ran through his mind as one unbroken sequence, abduction included.
Simon believed the sighting, not the abduction. He accepted that the Hills had seen something unusual in the sky and been badly shaken by it.
But he found the abduction improbable. His best remaining explanation was that Betty had come to believe her own dreams, and Barney had absorbed them.
Even that theory he held loosely. As he put it later: “If you can call it a conclusion. It never really was one.”
The Hills never bought it. If Betty’s dreams were the only source, they asked, what about the figures Barney saw through binoculars while wide awake, and the parts of the abduction he recalled that Betty didn’t?
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For a year, the disagreement stayed inside that office.
Then a stranger called.
A Stranger Calls, and a Book Follows
In the late summer of 1965, a newspaper reporter phoned Simon. The reporter already knew about the Hills, their treatment, and the hypnosis.
Simon refused to talk. So did the Hills.
The reporter said he’d publish anyway, and he had material: that forgotten Quincy talk, taped without the couple’s knowledge, plus notes from their confidential interviews with investigators.
That October, the Boston Traveler ran the story on its front page. Suddenly the Hills were public property, and every wild claim seemed to come straight from the hypnosis sessions.
So the couple decided the only defense was the whole record. They asked Simon to hand his tapes to the writer John G. Fuller.
In 1966, The Interrupted Journey came out with long transcripts of the sessions and an introduction by the doctor himself.
That book, more than any sighting report, turned a New Hampshire couple into the template for the modern abduction story. It also put Simon’s doubts on the record, in the same volume as the voices he’d recorded.
What a Tape Can and Can’t Prove
In that introduction, Simon warned readers about the very tool he’d relied on.
Hypnosis, he wrote, is a pathway to the truth “as it is felt and understood by the patient.” That truth may or may not match what actually happened.
Research since then backs him up. The American Psychological Association notes that hypnotic suggestion can produce distorted or false memories, and that people tend to trust those memories more, not less.
None of that is a diagnosis of Betty or Barney. It just means a recording of someone remembering under hypnosis shows what they experienced in the chair, not what happened on the road.
What the tapes do preserve is the order the story arrived in.
The light, the figures, the beeps, and the fear were on paper within weeks. The inside of the craft, the examination, and the map showed up first as Betty’s dreams, and then, in 1964, as testimony under hypnosis.
Where the Tapes Are Now
Barney died in 1969 and Betty in 2004. The tapes outlived them both.
Betty’s niece Kathleen Marden transcribed the sessions and compared the two accounts for the book Captured! In 2006, she signed the Hills’ papers over to the University of New Hampshire.
The archivist who processed the collection describes Betty’s correspondence and journals, audio and video tapes, the 1964 star map, and the stained blue dress she wore that night.
The collection is open by appointment. Fuller’s transcripts are still the easiest way to read long stretches of the sessions.
- Follow John Fuller's book-length account of the Hills' reported encounter
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Found a clip online? Look for a session date and for Simon’s questions, because a dramatic excerpt with narration over it isn’t the same thing as a session.
In Fuller’s book, the Hills summed up their own position in one line. “What came out on the recordings,” they said, “was as difficult for us to believe as for anybody else.”
Listen with that line in mind, and the tapes stop being proof of anything. They go back to being what they always were: two people trying to find out what happened to them.
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