Aug 02 2007
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Friedman on Abductions
Today is a little different. We have a guest post from Stan Friedman on the famous Betty and Barney Hill case, which is the subject of his new book (co-authored with Betty’s niece, Kathleen Marden), Captured!: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction, the Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. And so, here’s Stan:
Proof in the Stars? Astronomy Holds the Key to Alien Abduction
by Stanton T. Friedman
It is not usually easy to validate claims made by UFO witnesses, and it is especially difficult in those cases in which an abduction seems to have taken place. The real complication occurs when hypnosis is used to investigate missing time in conjunction with the abduction.
In the case of the very well-known abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, many individual hypnosis sessions were conducted three years later by Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist with a long history of using medical hypnosis to recover repressed memories of traumatic experiences, especially those that occurred on the battlefield during World War II. Simon knew nothing about UFOs, yet felt it was his duty to elicit details from Betty and Barney under very deep hypnosis to try to determine what happened during their encounter with a strange space vehicle and eleven alien beings.
Following the pent up emotion released by the Hills while in their separate hypnotic states, Simon induced amnesia in each of them in order to prevent them from discussing what they were beginning to recall. This allowed for careful cross comparison between their distinct accounts.
One key validating revelation was Betty’s conversation with an alien about a three-dimensional model or map (probably a hologram) that was shown to her after she asked where they were from. There was a pattern of a dozen or so lights (stars) connected with three types of lines indicating heavy trade routes, light trade routes and occasional expeditions. Betty knew little of astronomy and was unable to explain where she was in the model. Simon instructed her to draw it after she indicated she could remember what it looked like. The drawing was subsequently included by John G. Fuller in his best-selling book, The Interrupted Journey.
At first there seemed to be no way to determine if the map had any meaning. After all, our galaxy, the Milky Way, has at least two hundred billion stars. Fortunately, a brilliant woman, Marjorie Fish, visited Betty to get more details about the map, in spite of fact that Fish was dubious about the Hills’ assertion that the alien beings were humanoid. Nonetheless, over a period of a few years and more interviews with Betty, Fish built about twenty-six different three-dimensional bead and fishing line models. Her goal was to find a 3-D pattern to match the two-dimensional pattern that Betty had drawn.
I had been favorably impressed by Betty and Barney when we met in Pittsburgh in 1968 and when I read The Interrupted Journey and Fuller’s Look Magazine articles about the Hills. My colleague, Coral Lorenzen, International Director of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization––one of the two major UFO groups at the time––asked me as a scientist to assist Fish in communicating the results of her research. I agreed, and visited her during one of my lecture tours. I also helped her explain her work at a meeting at Adler Planetarium in Chicago and during a presentation at a Mutual UFO Network Symposium in Akron.
Believing Fish to be objective and credible, I published the first article about her work in Saga Magazine and later arranged to interview her and Betty for my documentary film, “UFOs ARE Real.” I also convinced the editor of Astronomy Magazine, Terence Dickinson, to speak with her and to publish an article, “The Zeta Reticuli Incident,” about her work. It ultimately received more response than any article Astronomy had ever published, before or since.
Also appearing in my documentary was a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, Dr. George Mitchell, who had been helpful to Fish in obtaining closely-held star catalogs. He used one of her large models as a teaching tool and testified as to her care and accuracy in constructing the models.
Through her detailed and careful research, she was eventually able to identify all the stars in the pattern, and found that all of the pattern stars were sun-like (notwithstanding that fewer than 5 percent of the stars within 55 light years of the Sun are sun-like). Some stars are too old, too new, too bright, too dim, or vary too much in the intensity of their energy production rate to be sun-like, or they have very close companion stars making it difficult to maintain stable planetary orbits in the vicinity. The pattern stars are also, amazingly enough, in a plane, like slices of pepperoni on a thin pizza rather than spread all about like raisins in a loaf of raisin bread. This makes travel between the stars much easier. The pattern is definitely not coincidental.
And most remarkably, Fish identified the base stars as Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli in the southern sky constellation Reticulum, but only after much better data on the distances to nearby stars was obtained and used to rebuild the models. Nobody building a model before the Hill experience would have obtained the right identification. A unique twosome, Zeta 1 and 2 Reticuli are the closest pair of sun-like stars in our entire local neighborhood. They are only 1/8 of a light year apart from each other, only 39.2 light years away from earth and a billion years older than the sun. These two stars had never been highlighted as special before Fish’s discoveries. It makes sense that they would be the hub of the local neighborhood.
The cosmic perspective for intelligent inhabitants of a planet around Zeta 1 or 2 Reticuli would be very different than that for an Earthling, as the sun is thirty-five times farther away from the nearest star than the distance between Zeta 1 and Zeta 2. We Earthlings are out in the boondocks with no other star close by. However, from a planet orbiting around either of these stars, the other star is visible to the eye all day long, and planets around the other star would be directly observable. No inferences would be necessary. Even with our primitive equipment, at such a close distance we could determine, from the composition of the atmosphere around these planets, if biological activity were present.
Residents of Zeta 1 and 2 would have a much greater incentive to undertake interstellar travel than we have here on Earth. They would also have had much more time for the development of advanced travel technology with their billion year head start on us. Technological progress invariably comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way and we primitives have already determined methods for star travel.
The star map work done by Marjorie Fish was a crucial factor, along with others, in the general acceptance of the Hill story of abduction. Her work was also the target of debunkers and skeptics, including Carl Sagan, who misrepresented Fish’s methods and her results. These attacks along with many others on the Hill case, such as in the TV program, “Cosmos,” are discussed in detail in my book, co-authored by Betty’s niece, Kathleen Marden, Captured!: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction, The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience.
(UFOMystic thanks Liz Owens and everyone at Warwick Associates for permission to reproduce the article.)
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August 2nd, 2007 at 9:00 pm
“Nobody building a model before the Hill experience would have obtained the right identification”
So now there is a “right identification” and a “wrong identification” — and let me guess — the only “right identification” will be the one that agrees with Fish and Stanton’s identification? It is presumptuous and arrogant for anyone to make a claim like that. What is this alleged “right identification” based on anyway? A report of an experience, made in the complete vacuum of evidence of what was reported. The only two witnesses were untrained observers who were unable to provide corroboration for their storytale. Where is the “science” in all of this? There is none! If we take the logic used to support the Fish map, any identification could be the “right identification”, if you want it to be.
“A unique twosome, Zeta 1 and 2 Reticuli are the closest pair of sun-like stars in our entire local neighborhood”
Where in Betty’s testimony does she claim that the two main stars in the star chart could both only be Sun-like? It is presumptuous for Betty, Fish, or Stanton to assert that the two main stars could only be Sun-like stars. If our Sun were replaced with Zeta 1, it would clearly not be like our Sun for it is 3/4ths as bright, 0.9 times as big, and much more reddish in color. The Alpha Centari binary system also has a Sun-like star, just like the Zeta system, so why couldn’t that be the hub of the imaginary trade routes depicted by Betty? Oh, I forgot, it wouldn’t be the “right identification” then, merely because it would disagree with Fish and Stanton’s version.
There are dozens of constellations out there and, if you use your imagination, all of them look like what they are named after. Of course, they actually don’t resemble what they are named after but is the result of people who got carried away with their superstitious imaginations. If you want to, you can visualize any pattern you want to see in the stars. So when Fish took a look at Betty’s rough sketch of a star chart depicting alleged trade routes between unknown stars with unknown names at unknown distances from each and with unknown spectral classes, there is an awful lot of room for Fish to get carried away with her imagination there. It is a modern day equivalent of a Rorschach test, only instead of a random blotch of smeared ink, they are using that big inkblot in the night time sky and interpreting what they imagine they see in it (or what they hope is in it).
“We Earthlings are out in the boondocks with no other star close by”
The average distance of between stars is a little over four light years, There is a binary star system located four light years away from the Sun, called Alpha Centari A and Alpha Centari B. That means the Sun could not be in the “boondocks”, as Stanton falsely asserts, but in the “suburbs”. The Sun has just as many other stars within range of it as any other typical star out there.
This whole thing is sheer nonsense. I mean we have entire books — a virtual encyclopedic collection of them — on the in-depth psychology of aliens and the trade routes that aliens use and the vehicles they pilot and detailed anatomy of aliens and detailed descriptions of the planets they come from…yet we have never have met them face-to-face or been to their home planets or corresponded with them in any way, shape, or form. How can people write so very much on something they have never even heard, seen, smelled, tasted, or touched for themselves? This whole entire charade reminds me of The Emperor’s New Clothes. In Stanton’s case, he reminds me of a used car salesman, only he sells UFOs instead of used cars.