Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The first question one can ask about this report concerns the identity of the object Betty first saw and later concluded was a UFO following the car. Sheaffer (1981) shows quite convincingly that it was the planet Jupiter. He points out that on the night of September 19, 1961, there were three bright objects visible in the night sky in northern New Hampshire. One was the moon; the other two were the planets Saturn and Jupiter. In her report, Betty Hill says that she saw the moon, one bright “star” and the UFO. She does not report seeing two bright “stars.” This is a crucial point. If a real UFO had been present that night, she would have seen four objects in the sky—the moon, the two “stars,” and the UFO. But she saw only three objects.

What about the “lost” two hours that later take on so much importance as the time during which the abduction took place? An examination of the Hills’ reports regarding their time of arrival home in the months and years following the incident shows them to be extremely inconsistent (Sheaffer 1981; Klass 1974). The fact that two hours were allegedly missing from their lives was not even noticed by the Hills until a few weeks after the incident, following extensive questioning by pro-UFO investigators (Sheaffer 1981).

How does one account for the Hills’ reports of the abduction that were revealed under hypnosis? It is commonly believed that hypnosis allows lost memories to be retrieved. Actual research on hypnosis shows a far different picture: Memories retrieved under hypnosis are even more unreliable than normal memories. Hilgard (1980–81) reports that he “implanted in a subject a false memory of an experience connected with a bank robbery that never occurred, and the person found the experience so vivid that he was able to select from a series of photographs a picture of the man he thought had robbed the bank” (p. 25). Similar fictitious memories can be created in hypnotized subjects simply by asking leading questions that presume that an event occurred, even if it didn’t (Laurence and Perry 1983). Claims that hypnosis enhances memory in real-world situations, such as crime reports, also turn out to be incorrect (Smith 1983). Hypnosis is used in crime situations only after several nonhypnotic sessions have been conducted with the witness to try to retrieve more details from memory. Such repeated attempts at recall themselves enhance memory, and hypnosis adds nothing to this enhancement (Dywan and Bowers 1983; Nogrady, McConkey, and Perry 1985). Consider two groups of individuals who are asked to recall a particular incident. Both groups are quizzed three times without hypnosis. On the fourth attempt at recall, one group is hypnotized, the other isn’t. In this sort of study, recall on the fourth attempt is better than on the first for the hypnotized group—but it is equally improved for the nonhypnotized group. It is the repeated recall attempts, not the hypnosis, that are responsible for the improved recall (Smith 1983). What hypnosis does do—and this is especially relevant to the UFO cases—is to greatly increase hypnotized subjects’ confidence that their hypnotically induced memories are true. This increase in confidence occurs for both correct and incorrect memories (Nogrady, McConkey, and Perry 1985). For a recent review of hypnosis effects, see Schacter (2001) and the references therein. (The role of hypnosis in the creation of false memories of child and satanic ritual abuse is also discussed in chapter 5 of the present volume.) Thus, hypnosis can create false memories, but the individual will be especially convinced that those memories are true. People repeating such false memories will seem credible because they really believe their false memories to be true. Their belief, of course, does not indicate whether the memory is actually true or false. Hilgard (1980–81) has concluded that “the use of hypnotic recall as evidence in UFO abduction cases is an abuse of hypnosis” because “abundant evidence exists that fabrication can take place under hypnosis” (p. 25). Klass (1980–81) has noted examples of such fabrication in several abduction stories.

The psychiatrist who hypnotized the Hills was asked whether he believed their abduction and examination stories were true. He replied, “Absolutely not!” (Klass 1974, p. 253). The psychiatrist had told John Fuller the same thing, but Fuller somehow failed to include this relevant expert opinion in his book or articles.

The reports elicited under hypnosis were very likely simply the retelling of the dreams that Betty had had and which she had described to Barney in some detail. Betty had also read some sensational UFO literature after the incident, and the reports therein could easily have formed the basis for her “memories” related under hypnosis.

Betty Hill’s claim of multiple radar confirmations of the UFO also disappear when examined closely. The documents that she says prove her claim have mysteriously disappeared. Only one radar report of an unknown target took place that night. This was at Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the coast—miles from the place where the Hills saw the UFO. The one unidentified contact that night at Pease was on the base’s Precision Approach Radar, which looks directly down a runway and is used to guide planes landing on the runway. The object was four miles out and was described as a “weak” target. Sheaffer (1981) points out that this type of radar is so sensitive that it sometimes detects birds. More importantly, the base Airport Surveillance Radar, which scans the entire area, showed no unidentified target that night.

Betty Hill’s “star map” is often claimed to be the best evidence for the reality of the Hills’ close encounter. How could Betty possibly have drawn such an accurate map of stars that she didn’t even know existed unless, as she claimed, she saw the map when she was aboard the UFO? The map consists of twenty-six dots representing stars, some of which are connected by lines representing trade routes between the stars. Several attempts have been made to match the pattern of dots on the map to patterns of actual stars. Great success has been claimed for these attempts but, as usual, the claims fall short on examination.

Saunders (1975) reports that one attempt to match the map to a pattern of actual stars is so accurate that such a match would be expected to occur by chance only once in one thousand times. What Saunders fails to mention to his readers is that the seemingly impressive match uses only fifteen (57 percent) of the twenty-six stars. Eleven (43 percent) of the stars on the original map are simply ignored, apparently because they don’t fit. Errors occur in this match as well (Sheaffer 1981). There is an incorrect orientation between the supposed “home star” of the UFO occupants and a nearby star in the match. That is, the orientation in the match turns out to be quite different from that on Betty Hill’s original map. Soter and Sagan (1976) have noted a further problem with the match proposed by Saunders. If one removes the drawn-in lines on both the match and the original map, the resemblance disappears. The lines impose an illusory similarity that is not present when considering the actual stars alone.

The Milky Way Galaxy consists of approximately 100 billion stars. Out of that number, there will be, by pure chance alone, many sets of twenty-six stars that match the pattern on Betty Hill’s map with impressive accuracy. If enough time were spent, one could probably find thousands of such matches. They would, of course, prove nothing, as the same number of matches could be made to a random pattern of twenty-six dots on paper. The much-discussed “star map” appears, after close inspection, to be nothing more than just such a random pattern produced by Betty Hill’s fertile imagination.