Betty Hill Star Map
Betty Hill drew a star map she said she saw during her 1961 abduction. Marjorie Fish matched it to Zeta Reticuli; critics disputed it and Fish later dropped it.
Betty Hill said she was shown a map of stars during the abduction she reported with her husband Barney on 19 to 20 September 1961 near the White Mountains of New Hampshire. She drew it afterwards, and the drawing was printed in John Fuller’s 1966 book The Interrupted Journey. A few years later an amateur astronomer matched it to a real star pattern. That match is disputed, and its author later withdrew it.
The Drawing
The Hills were driving home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when they reported seeing a craft and later found that two hours of the trip were missing. The UFO researcher Walter Webb first interviewed them on 21 October 1961. Betty said she recalled the map during the 1964 hypnosis sessions with the Boston psychiatrist Dr Benjamin Simon. The map has fifteen stars joined by lines, some solid and some broken. Betty described the lines as routes. The drawing is a hand sketch by a person with no astronomical training.
Marjorie Fish
Marjorie Fish was an elementary school teacher and amateur astronomer from Oak Harbor, Ohio. In 1968 she read Fuller’s book and built a three-dimensional model of nearby Sun-like stars from beads and thread, using distances in the 1969 Gliese catalogue. After studying thousands of viewpoints over several years, she found that only one vantage point fitted, near the double star Zeta Reticuli, about 39 light-years away. She sent her work to Webb, who agreed with it and passed it to Terence Dickinson, editor of Astronomy magazine. Dickinson did not endorse the conclusion, but the December 1974 issue opened a debate over it, and the magazine ran arguments on both sides for about a year.
The Dispute
Carl Sagan and Steven Soter argued that the match was a chance alignment of points picked from many possible stars and viewpoints. In a 1980 episode of Cosmos, Sagan showed that without the drawn lines, Hill’s map bore no resemblance to the real star field. The match also depends on which stars are included, how the lines are drawn and which direction is chosen. In the early 1990s the Hipparcos satellite showed that some of the stars in Fish’s model were much farther away than she had thought, and Fish publicly rejected her own hypothesis.
Assessment
The map is not independent evidence that the Hills met aliens. The hypnosis sessions produced the drawing, and hypnosis can produce vivid false memories. The Zeta Reticuli reading rests on a pattern that fits no better than chance after the star distances were revised. The Hills’ experience itself remains undocumented beyond their own testimony.
Sources
- Betty and Barney Hill abduction (Wikipedia) - the encounter, the hypnosis sessions, Marjorie Fish, Walter Webb and the critics