Betty and Barney Hill’s UFO Location: The Route, the Marker and the Spot
There's a spot on Route 3 in New Hampshire where the state will happily point you toward a flying saucer. It's historical marker 224, and it's the easy part of finding the Betty and Barney Hill location.
The rest of the story happened from a moving car.
The light first showed up near one town, the close encounter came near another, and the beeping noises arrived thirty miles farther down the road.
So before you drop a single pin, it helps to think of the Hills' night as a route. And before the route, a quick word about the couple who drove it.
Who Were Betty and Barney Hill?
Betty and Barney Hill lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Betty was a social worker with a master's degree, Barney served on the governor's Civil Rights Commission, and both were NAACP members and civil-rights activists in the 1960s.
In September 1961 they took a trip to Niagara Falls and Montreal, and on the night of the 19th they drove home through the White Mountains. What they reported from that drive became the first widely reported alien-abduction account in the United States.
The story is famous for what happened. The geography is about where, so let's start the car.
Which Route Were the Hills Taking?
The Hill family's official site reconstructs the drive from the original reports. The Hills left Colebrook, in the far north of the state, at 10:05 p.m. after dinner at a restaurant called Howard's, and headed south on U.S. Route 3 toward Portsmouth.
South of Lancaster, Betty noticed a bright light that didn't behave like a star. From there the object seemed to keep pace with the car as Route 3 climbed into the mountains.
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They stopped more than once to look. The family's reconstruction lists a picnic area at Mt. Cleveland and the Old Man of the Mountain in Franconia Notch, the famous stone profile that was still on its cliff in 1961.
Franconia Notch is the mountain pass at the heart of this story. The University of New Hampshire's account of the Hill collection places the encounter "in the area of Franconia Notch" and describes the attention the case drew afterward.
It's roughly 70 miles from Colebrook to Lincoln, and the object was with them for more than half of it. An encounter from a moving car doesn't come with one neat viewing point, because the place where you first notice something isn't the place where you stop for a better look.
Everything converges on one stretch of road near Lincoln, though. That's exactly where the state put its sign.
Where Is the Betty and Barney Hill Marker?
Look for New Hampshire historical marker 224, titled "Betty and Barney Hill Incident." It stands on the Daniel Webster Highway, which is U.S. Route 3, close to the Indian Head Resort in Lincoln.
The Historical Marker Database has photographs, a map and the coordinates: 44° 5.128′ N, 71° 41.048′ W. Its location note puts the sign on your right when you're traveling north.
That's the opposite direction from the Hills' drive home, a small detail worth remembering if you're trying to retrace their route.
The marker was erected in 2011 by the New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources. Its inscription describes "a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two hours of lost time while driving south on Rte 3 near Lincoln."
It also notes that the Hills filed an Air Force Project Blue Book report the next day but stayed quiet until the story leaked in the Boston Traveler in 1965. And it ends by calling this "the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States."
What it doesn't do is mark a scientifically established landing spot, and that's by design.
The resort matters because the family's reconstruction puts the close encounter roughly a mile south of it. That's where Barney opened his door, stepped onto the highway with binoculars, and said he saw figures watching him from the craft, somewhere between eight and eleven of them.
So the sign is close to the most famous scene. It still isn't the whole night, which is why maps of the case disagree.
Why Do Maps Show Different "Abduction Sites"?
Part of the problem is that "the location" can mean several things. A roadside monument, a stretch of the original drive, and a proposed encounter spot aren't necessarily the same destination.
| If You Want to Find… | Look for… |
|---|---|
| The setting of the journey | The Route 3 corridor from Lancaster to Ashland through the White Mountains. |
| The historical landmark | Marker 224 near Indian Head Resort in Lincoln. |
| A particular part of the account | A reconstruction that explains which observation or recollection it is mapping. |
Some familiar details belong to the 1964 hypnosis sessions rather than to observations recorded during the drive. A mapmaker using those later recollections may be proposing a spot that never appeared in the 1961 reports.
Then there's the gap itself. The Hills remembered hearing beeping sounds near Ashland, about thirty miles south of Lincoln, and couldn't account for much of the road in between.
That makes a precise pin less conclusive than it looks. Check which moment it represents before assuming you've found the location of the entire alleged encounter.
The good news is that the route itself is still there, mostly.
Can You Still Drive the Route?
Yes, though it has changed. Through Franconia Notch, the road is now the Franconia Notch Parkway, an eight-mile stretch where Interstate 93 winds between the Kinsman and Franconia ranges.
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The Old Man of the Mountain, where the Hills paused, is gone. The stone profile collapsed on May 3, 2003, so that stop is a memory now.
Indian Head is still up there. It's a rock profile on the mountainside beside Route 3 in Lincoln, and the resort below takes its name from the silhouette.
One practical tip: the marker is on Route 3, not on the interstate. South of the notch, Route 3 runs through Lincoln as the Daniel Webster Highway, and that's the road you want.
Once you're there, a few habits make the stop better.
How Can You Make the Most of a Visit?
Start with the marker's full name and number when checking the map. That gives you a clearly identified destination rather than a loosely labeled "UFO site."
Use designated parking and follow posted conditions. The resort and other nearby businesses have their own access arrangements, and the marker's presence doesn't make every surrounding area open to visitors.
Take a moment to read the inscription. Its short chronology helps separate the night of the journey from the years in which the story reached a wider audience.
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Then put the stop back into the larger route. The distances between Lancaster, Lincoln and Ashland explain why squeezing the whole account into a single pin leaves so much out.
You don't need to recreate the drive after dark or hunt for a hidden landing spot to appreciate the setting. The road and the documented landmark already give you plenty to connect with the story.
And if you want the rest of the Hills' story, it's waiting at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.
What Happened Beyond That Night?
Portsmouth was the Hills' destination that night, and it stayed their home through everything that followed. UNH's announcement of their archival collection puts their civil-rights work in the headline right beside the abduction claim.
Barney died in 1969. Betty, a UNH graduate from the class of 1958, kept a journal of UFO sightings in the years that followed and published her own account of the case in 1996.
Her papers came to the university in 2006, two years after her death at 85. The collection holds her torn and stained dress, the star map she drew under hypnosis, and a fiberglass bust based on the couple's description of the visitors.
It draws true believers and skeptics alike, plus a group the university's magazine describes as "alien-abduction tourists." It's a welcome reminder that their lives were bigger than the incident on the sign.
For a visit, marker 224 is the straightforward place to begin. For the encounter itself, follow the road from Lancaster to Ashland and let the route tell the story that a single pin can't.
Betty and Barney Hill Encounter: The UFO Abduction That Defined a Genre
The Hill Hypnosis Tapes: A Journey Into Missing Time