November 15: Fill & Download for Free

On October 10. 1970, 6 year old Matthew Winkler, of the Willshire region in Northwest Ohio, was bitten by a rabid bat on thumb while he slept. It woke him up and his parents rushed in to his room in response to his cries. The bat was collected and sent to the state health lab in Columbus for testing. 4 day later it was confirmed that the bat was rabid, and Matt was given what was available at that time, a series of 15 shots in his abdomen in as many days, on alternating sides of his abdomen. The doctors were concerned, however, because the vaccine had never been successful when given more than 72 hours following the exposure, and Matt was past that time. But, by the last shot, Matt appeared to be healthy.However, on October 30, Matt developed a stiff neck, fever, and felt dizzy. They hoped it was only flu, which was, not surprisingly, going around at the front end of the flu season. However, by November 3, his fever spiked to 104.6, and he was referred to a pediatrician who immediately hospitalized him at St. Rita's Hospital in Lima, Ohio.There, his doctors hoped that he was only reacting to the shots, which was not particularly uncommon. Indeed, the original horse serum vaccine was known to occasionally cause considerable damage to the patients who received it, in and of itself.By November 14, Matt's speech became garbled, he lost coordination, displayed paralysis, and became semi-comatose. His doctors treated Matt very aggresively, addressing every sign immediately as it appeared. They gave him a tracheotomy, anticonvulsants, and a variety of intense supportive care, inter alia. By December 2, 1970, Matt was improved enough that he held his head up and said his first words since the disease got its grip on him: “Hi".Matt was discharged January 27, 1971, and then spent several more months going through speech, physical, and occupational therapy. Not surprisingly, he lost that year of school. But, at the end of his treatment, they could find no evidence of permanent damage.As of the current time, Matt is married and has two sons. I believe that he is the only person to.have survived rabies without permanent neurologicsl damage, although that may have changed in the past few years; at least we can hope so. I followed Matt's events very closely at the time because they bore particular relevance to me, since I ran a zoo and collected my own animals quite often.Rabies Lassavirus is BAD stuff. It is still fair to consider it as effectively 100% fatal once clinical symptoms develop. A *very* few, incredibly lucky individuals have survived clinical rabies.Which is why, when I told my doctor I needed to get rabies shots, she immediately asked me when I was bitten and where. I explained to her I hadn't yet been bitten, I was just planning on it. She stared at me briefly, reflected upon who I was, and queried “explain". Well, I was moving from Indiana to Massachusetts. Indiana had virtually no reported rabies at that time, and in Massachusetts it was then regarded as endemic. Since I have lots of non-domestic (isn't that a polite phrase?) animal encounters, I take rabies very seriously, and have since I was a young teenager running a small private zoo. There I encountered many rabid bats. At that time, rabies was endemic in the bat population on the upper Mississippi basin. I was in Northern Wisconsin, which put me right in the middle of it all. Years later, as things turned out, I encountered my first rabid raccoon in Massachusetts about 4 months after I moved there. Right in my own back yard… And no, I didn't get bitten. That's defense #1.Rabies is *very* dangerous. Take it seriously.

To be absolutely sure, I feel like a true revolution in the US is a remote possibility even under the most volatile conditions. The American people have over 225 years of experience with respecting democratic traditions and the principle of laws above men, to include a bloody Civil War to look back on if ever in doubt of the consequences of failing to resolve differences peacefully (as well as a bloody Revolution that left America devastated, but that aspect of our fight for freedom does not get taught in schools as much).In short, Americans vastly prefer to resolve issues at the ballot box rather than with the ammo box.However, the question does not ask whether a revolution is likely (that’s elsewhere), or whether it would be successful, but what might trigger it. So that’s what I have limited my response to. Although the following scenario might not be probable, I feel it’s the most plausible for what could trigger a revolution in modern America.It’s 2020, and Americans have had it with the two-Party system. Two decades of “Do Nothing” Congresses fighting with successive Administrations, who have turned increasingly to governance by executive decree rather than by law, have left America with no clear domestic agenda while economic and social pressures mount.For decades, major polling firms have tracked the plummet of Americans’ attitudes towards and confidence in their government, and in recent years their moods have been at record lows. At times, even “0%” confidence has been within some polls’ margins of error.Meanwhile, gerrymander-protected Congressmen cushioned by generous campaign donations continue to protect those with access rather than advocate for the nation as a whole. “We’re just responding to the will of our constituents,” they say, even though ever more of them run in decreasingly competitive elections.The disputes in domestic policy are no longer ideological – it is no longer a matter of parties disagreeing with their vision for America – but truly the advantaged versus the disadvantaged. Wealth inequality has transformed from a topic of conversation to something people confront on a daily basis.The 2016 election was one of the most uninspiring in most Americans’ memories, with voter turnout at an historic low and enthusiasm gone beyond the Parties' truly faithful.Two years after the election, faced with still more of the same, the American people decided to make their frustration more apparent, and their resolve channeled into several victories for dark horse, third-party candidates in the 2018 Midterms. It was only a handful of members, but enough to reduce the Republican majority in the House to single-digits. Third-party wins in New England Senate races denied both Parties a majority in the Senate.Political observers expressed their hopes that the voters’ clear message of frustration with the lack of progress in government would force the parties to be more compromising in their agendas, but it did not come to pass. The president, too, did not back down in the face of the independent victories, and continued to use Congressional paralysis as reason to govern by executive order.Going into the presidential election, a charismatic, independent candidate who promises to take the fight to the established Parties grows a large following. His campaign is dubbed “Shock Therapy” for a “flat-lining” America.Despite rising support in the polls over the spring, the Commission on Presidential Debates, controlled by the Democratic and Republican Parties, goes on record as saying that it will exclude the candidate from the debates. This sparks outrage from multiple quarters – not just the candidate’s supporters – and after a demonstration outside the first debate turns violent, the CPD extends the Independent an invitation for the subsequent two debates.The Independent shines on the national stage, eviscerating the Democratic and Republican contenders, who come across as tired advocates for the status quo, unable to rise above ideology for the good of all. He surges in the polls, money and volunteers flood his campaign, and by October there are projections that he could, against all odds, secure an electoral victory.Party stalwarts and pundits, however, cast off these projections as wishful thinking, and claim that their internal polls show no signs of a mass defection towards the Independent.For the remainder of the month, Americans are bombarded with campaign rhetoric that oscillates from combative to panicked, with partisan commentators going well out of their way to demonstrate just why their candidate is all but assured of victory and what that will mean for the country.November 3, 2020Voter turnout in 2016 was down dramatically from 2012, as neither Democrats nor Republicans were particularly enthusiastic about their candidate – to say nothing of the independents’ thoughts – but early signs are that this year’s election has surged to 2008’s level, if not higher.The first polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern time, but it is not until 7 p.m. that results can be announced for certain States. Whereas in elections past the networks are easily able to declare a slew of winners at this hour, the only state they call with certainty is Vermont for the Democratic candidate.It is not necessarily a cause for alarm, though, the pundits say. Voters should be used to the traditional battlegrounds of Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina being called later in the evening. They gloss over that the reported vote tallies are alarmingly low for the traditional Parties. After some nail-biting, however, Kentucky and West Virginia are sorted into the Republican column soon after 7:30.When 8 p.m. rolls around, normalcy appears to return to the electoral landscape. The traditional Northeast, Democratic strongholds roll over to the Democrats. Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Oklahoma are called for the Republicans. Battleground states Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Missouri are too close to call, but as the pundits stated before, this should not be unexpected.But when a wave of votes comes in from Virginia, the status quo narrative comes to an abrupt end.The Independent candidate has won the Commonwealth with over 40 percent of the vote. At 8:30, when Arkansas predictably goes for the Republican candidate, North Carolina and Georgia are called for the Independent.Then Ohio goes.Then Florida.Commentators try to remain confident as they make projections about what the rest of the country might do, but it becomes apparent in just a matter of minutes that the electoral math is not looking good for the major Parties. Most concede that the Republican candidate will be unable to get the 270 votes needed to win the election, but surely the Democrats will hold Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, among others, and have a narrow victory.However, too many States remain in play, and the uncertainty grows the longer they remain uncalled.Late in the night, the math becomes clear: In order for the Democrats to win the election outright, they must take at least eight of the twelve outstanding States. Their window narrows once it appears that Missouri will be a toss-up between the Independent and the Republican. More results come in, and New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Colorado fall convincingly for the Independent.There’s no way around the reality of the election’s results anymore. Bewildered pundits declare an event that has not happened in the United States in almost 200 years: Nobody has won a majority of the Electoral Vote, and so the election will have to be decided by the next Congress.On Wednesday morning, the final results are even less comforting to any American who went to bed hoping the election would be settled definitively.Americans split their vote almost perfectly three ways, but the Democratic candidate edged out a slight victory in the popular vote: 35.8 percent against the Independent’s 32.3 and the Republican’s 31.9. The Independent candidate, however, appears to have prevailed with the electoral vote, earning 198 votes to the Democrat’s 186 and the Republican’s 154.Down ticket, a wave of third party candidates have been elected to the House of Representatives, but still nowhere near enough to secure an outright majority. Republicans, still benefiting from the redistricting that followed the 2010 Census, while no longer in the majority, control the most seats.Only one more third-party candidate is elected to the Senate, but the chamber’s edge is to the Democrats.Across the country, the Parties mobilize armies of lawyers and volunteers to dispute the election results before the States can certify them. Yet even if the Democratic and Republican Parties won all of the legal contests where there’s the best chance of victory, the Independent still won too many States indisputably for either of them to secure a majority in the Electoral College. It’s obvious to all that the best they can do is weaken the Independent’s position before the matter is taken up by the incoming Congress.The legal battles continue through December until, as happened 20 years prior, the Supreme Court forces the States still in contest to end their recounts and certify winners so that the incoming Congress can perform its Constitutional duty and elect the next heads of government.The result of their decision causes Missouri to flip to the Republicans, while New Mexico and Michigan edge to the Democrats. This causes the Independent to fall to second place in the electoral count, to only 3 above the Republicans, with the Democrats climbing to above 200.A week following the Supreme Court’s decision, the electors of the Electoral College meet in their respective State capitals. Throughout the week, many commentators have used their respective media platforms to urge the Independent’s electors to be faithless, believing that he will have no mandate to lead, and spare the country the agony of having Congress decide the election.Between having lost the lead in the Electoral College through partisan, acrimonious recounts and a Supreme Court ruling and being bombarded daily by pundits who believe their candidate should simply concede, the tens of millions of Americans who voted for the Independent begin to stitch a narrative together that the Parties are conspiring to nullify the impact of their votes. If anybody should bow out of the election, they say, it should be the Republicans, who placed third in both the electoral and popular votes.There are faithless electors in late December, but not from the Independent camp – and not many. Only one elector from each of the major Parties casts a vote for the Independent, which is not enough to skew the expected outcome: The Democrat leads, but not enough for victory.Americans now get a sobering lesson in the little-regarded Twelfth Amendment.With none of the candidates receiving a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives will be given the task of selecting the President of the United States. The Senate, the Vice President. But whereas each Senator is given the power to vote, in the House, each State Delegation gets a single vote. Moreover, the Twelfth Amendment restricts the selection of Vice President to the candidates who received the two highest numbers of electoral votes, thus eliminating the Republican candidate from consideration. In the House, all three leading presidential candidates are eligible for consideration.The Independent won the most electoral votes before the recounts, but there are only a handful of senators unaffiliated with the major Parties, and are no third party-dominated Delegations in the House. The Democrat won the greatest share of the popular vote before leading in the Electoral College, and the Democrats have the most Senators; but the Republicans, who lost both the popular and electoral votes, control an outright majority of Delegations in the House.January 4, 2021The new Congress convenes and immediately passes a resolution to meet in two days to count the electoral votes. Knowing the electoral situation, the House adopts rules for the counting of ballots that are identical to those passed in 1824, to respect the historic precedent and ensure consistency. After these votes and the recess of Congress, quietly, the Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders meet to discuss a compromise.The leaders agree that nobody wants to see the Independent candidates secure high office, but the question is how to block this from happening without upending the other Parties.In the Senate, the Republicans are urged to support the Democratic candidate for Vice President, as theirs is ineligible for consideration anyway. Republican leaders balk at the proposal, but are eventually persuaded to provide enough support for the Democrats to secure a one or two-vote victory – provided there are no Democratic defections.But what do the Republicans get in return? Democratic support in the House for the selection of the Republican candidate as President? The Democrats reject this. The Republicans trailed too far in the polls for that to be a legitimate possibility.Then what?If the Republicans in the House support the selection of the Democrat as President, then the Democrats will, in turn, support the election of the Republican Speaker of the House. In turn, the Vice President will resign – perhaps in exchange for a high profile cabinet position – and the then-President will select the Speaker as the new Vice President – the Speaker then replaced by another Republican. This would give the Republicans control of House leadership and tie-breaking capacity in the Senate which, given its narrow divide, would not be insignificant.The Republicans are less than convinced and offer no promises.January 6, 2021In the days since Congress convened, it appears to be ever more apparent that House Republicans are poised to select their candidate as President. Even though they came last in the election, they retained control of a large majority of State Delegations in the House. While only a few Republicans have gone on record with their express intent to vote for the Republican candidate, others point to the rules laid out in the Constitution and the necessity of honoring the law.Some Democrats and independents flirt with the possibility of a walkout unless Republicans agree to choose between the leading two candidates, but they simply do not have the numbers to deny the Republicans a Quorum and stall the vote.Tens of thousands of Americans have descended on Washington and Capitol Hill, demanding that their votes be respected. But as the demonstrators come from all camps, and the pressure on Congress already enormous, the protest does not appear to be a particularly persuasive force for those in the Capitol’s halls.A few minutes after 1 p.m., the joint session of Congress convenes in the House of Representatives to verify and count the electoral votes for President and Vice President. As expected, the result is206 for the Democratic candidates169 for the Independent candidates163 for the Republican candidatesThe joint session concludes, and the Members of Congress return to their respective chambers to select the President and Vice President.The Senate is first to go, not as a matter of custom – when the Senate was called upon to select the Vice President in 1836, the Presidential contest was not in doubt at the same time – but because it is easier to organize the roll call necessary to elect the Vice President than it is for the House to take the roll of Members, appoint Representatives as State tellers, cast and tabulate its ballots.By the time the House has confirmed that all 435 voting Members are present, the Senate has, by a larger than expected vote of 78-22, supported the Democratic candidate for Vice President. The news is instantaneously received in the House as its Members mull over their votes.One by one, Members hand their ballots into the Deans of their Delegations, each of whom then proceeds to quietly tabulate the States’ votes with another Member observing. They then wait for the Clerk to call the roll by State.As each State is called, the Sergeant-at-Arms carries two boxes to Delegation, wherein are placed two, identical ballots which declare the States’ selection. He carries one box to each side of the Rostrum, and once all boxes have been collected, 100 Members, two from each State, divide equally to tally and verify the vote of the House.The Republican candidate has prevailed.The presiding officer struggles to bring order to the Chamber as Democrats and independents loudly protest the result. Democratic leaders corner their Republican counterparts to demand answers, but are stonewalled. What are they going to do? Reveal their conspiracy to the public?Outside the Capitol, the scene is even more raucous, and several protesters are detained over the next several hours as many attempt to strike out at Members or otherwise make their disapproval known more physically. Many more protesters are hospitalized as fights break out between rival camps.On the airwaves, commentators and pundits try to play down the shock and anger. “This is how the system works,” they say. “Who should be surprised? Shouldn’t we be relieved that the Constitution has prevailed through this crisis?”Mere hours after Congress’ selection, the President and Vice President-elect hold a joint press conference in which they pledge to help bridge partisan divides and work for all Americans. “We have heard you,” they say. “Now it’s time to move forward.”In other days, these arguments might have prevailed, but Americans no longer believe in “the system.” The system has sheltered the advantaged while doing less and less for those trying to get ahead or scrape by. The system is defending its stagnation and the status quo. The system has obliterated tens of millions of votes for new representation and handed the government over to the minority.Nor do they believe that those in power are capable of bridging partisan divides. They have heard this rhetoric before, and ad nauseum, for far too long and with far too little to show for it to believe it this time.The Independent candidate, though incensed by him and his running mate being shut out by Congress, tries to appeal to people to respect the rule of law and challenge “the corrupt bargain” in coming elections. He promises to form a stronger Party to secure electoral gains in the years ahead and forever shatter the current system.Americans, by and large, are not having it. They no longer want to wait for the next election, or the next, to sort things out. Their anger is real, in the moment, and on the surface.On social media, a passage from America’s most sacred document goes viral:We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.It is soon, and then often, accompanied by an amalgamation of quotes from revered Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson:Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right. . . . It might be indeed if every form of government were so perfectly contrived that the will of the majority could always be obtained fairly and without impediment. But this is true of no form. . . . Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils. Bribery corrupts them. Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents.The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.January 20, 2021Seven-hundred thousand people are in the nation’s capital to attend the country’s 58th Inauguration, but it is hard to find the relatively few people who are there to celebrate if not the incoming leaders, the nation’s tradition of peaceful transfer of power. In cities around the country, millions more have gathered in public areas in protest to the incoming administration.At noon, when the President begins the oath of office, he is almost drowned out by the rise of jeers and curses from the crowd. These persist through his very short address to the agitated masses, in which he seems to be begging them to believe that a new age of unity is at hand that will benefit all Americans.When he and the Vice President retreat into the Capitol at the conclusion of the ceremony, their security advises that they forego the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. The number of arrests has already hit triple-digits, and the crowd moving from the Mall to the route threatens to overwhelm the security in place.They dismiss the recommendation – cowering in the Capitol might only provoke further anger – but they agree to delay the start of the parade, in the hopes people will surrender to the bitter cold and begin to disperse, and to remain in the limousine.The parade was supposed to begin around 2:30 p.m., but does not commence until an hour and a half later. The strategy of hoping the combination of cold and impending sunset would help disperse the crowds has worked to an extent, but it has meant that the devoted demonstrators still lingering are even more riled up.As the motorcade makes its way down Pennsylvania Avenue, the protesters’ response is intense, but mostly vocal – at first. Farther down the road, crowds begin to push against the barricades as the motorcade comes in sight, only to be pushed back by police.Between 9th and 10th Streets, eggs and, in defiance of the cold, shoes are thrown at the presidential limousine, and the motorcade begins to accelerate. But before the President and Vice President can make it to the safety of the White House, a protester becomes the spark that ignites the conflagration.At 13th Street, the corner of Freedom Plaza, as the barricades fail, a man is able to break through the police line and charges at the presidential limousine, rock in hand. He lets it fly, managing little more than to scratch the limousine’s paint, but in a fraction of a second is tackled by a combination of police and Secret Service.That alone might not have been enough to enrage the witnessing crowds, but the law enforcement officers, themselves riled by the hours of confrontation they have endured, break discipline and launch into a brief but brutal assault on the president’s assailant. It looks less like the protester is being arrested and more as though he is receiving a summary punishment.More protesters break free of the barricade in order to rescue their comrade, only to in turn be tackled and assailed. Pushing and shouting gives way to punches, and in minutes Freedom Plaza and the avenue are the site of a melee.Media outlets try to avoid broadcasting scenes of the violence to reduce the risk of provoking the millions watching at home; but as law enforcement and crowd control units rush down Pennsylvania Avenue to contain the violence, those who had remained after the limousine had passed take advantage of the thinning police lines and spill out onto the parade route.There’s no hiding the crumbling security situation anymore, and the nation’s capital is plunged into rioting not seen since 1968.Across the country, most of the crowds dispersed soon after the President was sworn in, but many remain in lasting protest, and are mostly peaceful. Once violence erupts in the capital, however, many local law enforcement agencies attempt to preempt the risk of disorder in their own cities and move in to clear the crowds.In all cases, their plans backfire. City after city witnesses the emergence of riots, until soon there’s hardly a State untouched by the anger spilling out from a fed-up population.Road to RevolutionThe Inauguration Day Riots are mostly quelled by week’s end, with isolated incidents lingering through to the end of the month. The final toll is comparable to a natural disaster. Dozens have been killed, with thousands more seriously injured. Property damages surpass one billion dollars.Although the violence has subsided for now, most recognize that Pandora’s Box has been opened. Grievances against the government are spilling out from all quarters, and respect for lawful authority has plummeted. More and more rallies turn violent at the merest hint of a crackdown, which creates a feedback cycle: Law enforcement arrives to the subsequent rally in bigger numbers and with more gear, convincing the protesters that their rights will not be respected, agitating them to violence, provoking a larger response, and so forth.Eventually, jurisdictions begin denying all demonstration permits in order to ease tensions, but this only sparks a rise in illegal protests and acts of civil disobedience.Congress, in the meantime, has ground to a halt. Democratic leaders, still chaffed by the Republican rejection of their compromise offer, refuse to support any scrap of the Republican agenda in the House and use an array of tactics to stall business in the Senate. Moreover, they refuse to confirm any of the Republican President's Cabinet nominations without concessions, leaving the whole of government starving for leadership. The handful of third party Representatives and Senators have given up on attempting to bridge the divide, and instead serve as conduits of public anger at the intransigent government.Meanwhile, down Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House, the President and Vice President often quarrel on the rare occasions where they speak, and the Administration has yet to put forward a clear agenda for moving the country out of its crisis of confidence.Americans’ largest, collective disapproval of their government comes in April, as a record number individuals “fail” to file tax returns. Recognizing the tax revolt, in a rare act of bipartisanship, Congress first passes a law to extend the filing date to the end of June with no penalties for those who did not file by April 15 – but with increased penalties thereafter.The June deadline, however, is not met with an increase in tax returns being filed, but a several-million strong protest on the National Mall. It is the first protest since the Inauguration Day Riots that articulate national demands for changes to the government. There are calls for a Constitutional Convention.Their demands are met with regurgitated rhetoric.In August, after a summer of news about tax evaders being arrested, redistricting favoring incumbents, and the failure of bipartisanship to make meaningful progress in Congress, the electorate’s anger erupts again as Members of Congress, on recess, duck and dodge at town hall meetings and other public events. Several events turn violent. Eventually, Congressmen stop appearing in public altogether.When Congress reconvenes in September, there are angry crowds at Capitol Hill to demand why the Congress has failed to act on an array of measures, with bills to approve a Constitutional Convention among them. Physical confrontations are rare at first – the police are quick to isolate and remove troublemakers – but the thin veneer of peace does not last long against the storm of discontent.On the afternoon of Friday, September 17, as Congress tries to rush through morning business so they can head back to their districts, protesters are successful in surging past the police lines and force their way into the Captiol Building, storming the House Chamber. The Floor is empty, as it usually is during business hours, but their occupation is a major victory in its symbolism and effect.Energized by the scene of their compatriots in command of the halls of Congress, protesters across the country storm and occupy their State assemblies, forcing legislatures in most States to follow in Congress’ footsteps and hastily adjourn.The message is clear: Americans no longer support the rules of the status quo, and no amount of rhetoric will be sufficient to placate them. Two centuries after the end of its first revolution, the American people have risen up again to revoke their consent to be governed under the ruling order.The Second American Revolution has begun.

The Hill abduction is fraught with problems, not the least of which revolve around hypnotically recovered memories and Betty Hill’s evidently phantasy-prone personality, but there may be a grain of truth at its core and it may not be as easy as it appears to dismiss her star map out of hand.In the United States, California will not admit testimony from a witness who has been hypnotized, while other jurisdictions will allow such testimony, subject to careful scrutiny. In Canada, too, “refreshed memory” evidence obtained through hypnosis is not automatically invalidated, but case law indicates that it will not be afforded any weight at trial. A hypnotized subject is characterized by increased suggestibility, extreme attentiveness to whatever the hypnotist says, heightened ability to fantasize, increased tolerance for ambiguity or reality distortion, enhanced ability to role play, which would include playing the role of a hypnotized subject recalling an abduction experience, and a sense of ease or effortlessness that embraces both physical and psychological activities. “The primary arguments against the use of hypnosis in forensic settings arise from demonstrations that hypnotized witnesses more frequently recall incorrect or false (fabricated) information during hypnosis than do non-hypnotized participants, that this incorrect information can be accompanied by high confidence, and that such information can be implanted through suggestive questioning techniques – a negative triple-whammy against the use of hypnosis.”During episodic-memory recall, the brain activates in much the same pattern as it was activated when the event occurred. In other words, to recall an event, the brain relives or re-enacts the synaptic patterns which accompanied the experience. Usually, people are pretty good at distinguishing between the brain’s re-enactments of events that objectively occurred, and subjective fantasies or false memories of events that have never borne a shared or sharable physical reality. During hypnosis, however, this discriminatory mechanism breaks down. “One of the key cues humans appear to use in making the distinction between reality and imagination is the experience of effort. Apparently, at the time of encoding a memory, a “tag” cues as to the amount of effort we expended: if the event is tagged as having involved a good deal of mental effort on our part, we tend to interpret is as something we imagined. If it is tagged as having involved relatively little mental effort, we tend to interpret it as something that actually happened to us. Given that the calling card of hypnosis is precisely the feeling of effortlessness, we can see why hypnotized people can so easily mistake an imagined past event for something that happened long ago.”When the hypnosis session is over and the brain’s re-enactment done, the “refreshed memory” is re-stored, as is any confabulated “new information” ostensibly uncovered during hypnosis, which subsequently carries all the encoded cues of an easily recalled “real memory.” Hence, the hypnotized subject’s later confidence in the reality of his or her recall of an event that may never have happened, or may have happened, but not exactly as hypnotically or post-hypnotically recalled. Most of the most significant occupant sightings are derivative of abduction reports, and most of the most interesting of the latter have flowed from hypnotic regression. However, there are numerous occupant encounters and some abduction reports wherein hypnosis played no role, and in the Hills’ case, the pre-abduction sighting details were recalled in an ordinary manner, and not recovered under hypnosis.At about midnight on 19-20 September, Betty (41) and Barney Hill (39) were driving south on Route 3 through the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire and were just south of Lincoln when they spotted a bright object moving north. It quickly changed direction and began to pace their car. Her curiosity piqued by its appearance and erratic flight pattern, Betty had Barney stop at the Mt. Cleveland picnic area 17 miles south of Lancaster for a better look. There they observed that the object seemed to be descending in their direction. They stopped again near Cannon Mountain to view the strange fuselage-shaped craft which was, by then, clearly playing cat-and-mouse with their vehicle, but it was when they came around a curve in the road at Indian Head that the cat finally pounced. There they were confronted with a flat, circular disk, hovering silently only “hundreds of feet” above the road. As it hovered, V-shaped fins tipped with red lights extended from either side of the fascinating craft, but when it swooped down towards their automobile, they decided to leave the area as quickly as possible. As described in his 21 September report for Project Blue Book by Pease AFB Major Paul W. Henderson, Chief Combat Intelligence, “while the object was above them after it had “swooped down” they heard a series of short, loud “buzzes,” which they described as sounding like someone had dropped a tuning fork. They report that they could feel these buzzing sounds in their auto….They continued on their trip and when they arrived in the vicinity of Ashland, N.H., about 30 miles from Lincoln, they again heard the “buzzing” sound of the “object”; however they did not see it at this time.” At a point after the first set of “buzzes,” Barney observed the UFO depart in a generally north-westerly direction.Absent the specifics of where they stopped and of spotting occupants, such was the information that Betty and Barney were willing to provide to Project Blue Book the day after their sighting. Afraid that he would be deemed a weirdo, Barney failed to mention that at Indian Head he had approached to within 100 feet of the 60-to-80 foot craft, whereupon, through binoculars, he discerned a double row of rectangular windows extending across its rim. Behind the windows were at least six figures, one of which Barney concluded to be the crew’s “leader.” Suddenly overcome with the certain fear that they were about to be captured, Barney quickly returned to the car and made a hasty retreat. The couple then seemed to be in a fugue state until the occurrence of the second set of “buzzes” woke them to the fact that they were approaching Ashland, but were not fully conscious until they noticed the sign CONCORD-17 MILES along Route 93. Later, they shared a vague, irrational, partial memory of having seen the Moon, but on the ground.If the Hills were reticent when it came to disclosing certain details, neither was Blue Book nor Major Henderson entirely forthcoming with them. On 22 September Blue Book learned that at 5:22 PM on 19 September an unknown object was observed for 18 minutes by military ground-radar located at the North Concord, Vermont, Air Force Station, itself about 17 miles west of Lancaster. The object was 80 miles south-southwest of the Station headed northwest, then south, flying in an erratic pattern at 62,000 feet. Blue Book appears to have been satisfied with the possibility that it was a Rawinsonde observation (weather) balloon, even though it carried the radar dimensions of an aircraft. Blue Book and Major Henderson were also aware that on 20 September at 0214 AM, the precision approach radar (PAR) at Pease AFB in Portsmouth detected an unknown “aircraft” four miles distant. A half-mile from the Tower, it pulled up. Another weak radar target then made a low approach towards the Tower, but none of the operators were able to make visual contact. Although Major Henderson recognized, to his credit, that “time and distance between the events could hint of a possible relationship” between the Pease AFB radar returns and the Hill sighting, Blue Book would conduct no independent investigation of the matter, but would nevertheless carry the Hills’ as a case of “insufficient data,” adding that it could have been Jupiter that they saw, distorted by a strong temperature inversion. It would have to have been a very strong inversion indeed, since at its closest approach, as described by Barney for Major Henderson’s report, it was “about the size of a dinner plate held at arm’s length.”Betty was soon sharing her experience with her sister, Janet Miller, reading up on UFOs, in touch with NICAP officials – and having nightmares. Betty’s nightmares - of being abducted at a roadblock on a lonely New Hampshire road and taken aboard a strange craft where she and Barney were subjected to separate physical examinations conducted by alien entities - began about 10 days after the UFO sighting, went on for five consecutive nights, then stopped and didn’t recur. Betty wrote them down in great detail. On 21 October 1961, Betty and Barney had their first interview with NICAP Scientific Advisor Walter Webb. He was favourably impressed. At the behest of NICAP head, Major Donald E. Keyhoe (USMC, ret.), on 25 November the Hills were interviewed again by Robert Holman, a scientific writer, and C.D. Jackson, an engineer, who were then preparing a paper which reasoned that Nikola Tesla, David Todd and Marconi “observed laboratory data and related phenomena that suggested the possibility that they were monitoring interplanetary communications during the period of 1899 to 1924.” Also present at the interview was recently retired Air Force intelligence officer Major James MacDonald, a close friend of the Hills. When Holman asked, “what took you so long to get home?” Betty was suddenly terrified by the possibility that her worst fear - that her vivid nightmares reflected a real event - was true, and dropped her head to the table. Barney, too, realized for the first time that, even allowing for stops, “at the rate of speed I always travel, we should have arrived home at least two hours earlier than we did.”It soon became apparent to all present that “they were facing a period of simultaneous amnesia, experienced by each of them at the same time, falling roughly between the first series of beeps that emanated from the back of their car and the second series of beeps they encountered somewhere near Ashland, thirty-five miles to the south.” Holman, Jackson and MacDonald all proposed hypnosis.In the summer of 1962, Barney’s doctor, who was treating him for high blood pressure and ulcers, recommended that he see Exeter psychiatrist Dr. Duncan Stephens, to deal with his free-floating anxieties. Eventually, the sighting at Indian Head emerged as a possible factor in Barney’s general sense of unease. Was it Folie à Deux, “a delusional system that develops in a second person as a result of a close relationship with another person (the primary case) who already has a psychotic disorder with prominent delusions?” To leave no stone unturned, following Dr. Stephens’ advice, on 4 January 1964, Barney, voluntarily accompanied by Betty, commenced hypnotherapy with distinguished Boston psychiatrist and neurologist Dr. Benjamin Simon, and the rest, as they say, is history.The independently recovered memories of abduction and examination at the hands of alien beings which unfolded during their therapeutic sessions with Dr. Simon mirrored Betty’s series of vivid nightmares of two years earlier. Their story first became public knowledge, in part, on 25 October 1965 when the late John H. Luttrell with the Boston Traveler unexpectedly asked “A UFO Chiller: Did THEY Seize Couple?” Luttrell’s five-part series was based on information which was about three years old, so an updated and authorized version of the Hills’ story was serialized in the October 1966 editions of Look magazine under the title “Aboard a Flying Saucer” by John G. Fuller. That two-part serialization morphed into a 1966 best-seller, The Interrupted Journey, penned by the same author, which in turn spawned the 20 October 1975 NBC made-for-television movie The UFO Incident, with James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons. A symposium on the Hill case sponsored by Joe Firmage was held at Indian Head in 2000, giving rise to the 2007 Anomalist Books’ publication Encounters at Indian Head. Also in 2007, Betty’s niece, Kathleen Marden, and well-known UFOlogist and author Stanton T. Friedman, MSc., co-authored Captured: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, and in 2008 the HISTORY® channel’s (A&E Television Networks) UFO Hunters presented an interesting but entirely inconclusive episode called “Abductions,” which included the Hills’ case. Barney died suddenly in February 1969, but Betty went on to learn to value and enjoy her unusual experience and unexpected celebrity until her own death in 2004.Psychologically speaking, regression hypnosis actually helped the Hills come to grips with some of their post-encounter anxiety, behaviour and observations. Upon returning home, Betty noticed that her new dress needed mending, so she put the dress into a box, put the box in her closet, and simply forgot about it until Dr. Simon relieved her amnesia. When she retrieved the dress, she found that it was covered with a pink, powdery substance, and was unexpectedly stained. She aired it out on the clothesline, but never had it mended or wore it again. Some weeks following her series of unusual nightmares, Betty also had a significant panic attack when Barney slowed down to avoid some people milling around a car that was partially blocking the road in the countryside near Portsmouth: “she found herself starting to open the car door on the passenger side, with an almost uncontrollable impulse to jump out of the car and run.”Barney, too, was puzzled by his compulsion to self-examine his genitalia upon their 5 AM return home that fateful morning, and subsequently developed a near perfect circle of warts in the area of his groin. Though the information was allegedly suppressed in Fuller’s book at Barney’s request, it is widely claimed that his captors had placed a cup-like device over Barney’s genitals to extract sperm, an incident which may have re-emerged in elliptical terms during a 1966 hypnotic session with Dr. Simon and Dr. Hynek, when Barney suddenly shouted: “I didn’t like them putting that on me! I didn’t like them touching me!”There is no incontrovertible physical evidence that Betty and Barney Hill were abducted from their vehicle in the middle of the night on a lonely New Hampshire road and physically examined by aliens aboard a spacecraft, a problem which continues to stymie the acceptance of all such claims of alien contact. During the “debriefing” that followed her physical examination, Betty claimed that the “leader” agreed that she could take along a book as a memento, but another crewmember took it from her before she left the craft. The existence of shiny, silver-dollar sized circles Betty discovered on the trunk (from whence the buzzing sound) of their 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air hardtop, which would cause a compass placed on them to spin, was never validated by a third party. The 2008 examination of Betty’s dress from 1961 by the team of UFO Hunters revealed no anomalous substances, only fabric stress, supposedly consistent with a struggle – but the test fabric was probably sampled from the shoulder or armpit area where stress is only to be expected. Slight tears to the zipper and hem were similarly meaningless inasmuch as Betty was in and out of the car a number of times in country terrain. Barney’s warts may have been psychosomatic or symptomatic of an undiagnosed illness – though the latter seems unlikely since he did consult a physician to be rid of them as a simple nuisance.The best evidence that a UFO was present in the right place at about the right time was provided by the military radar systems at North Concord and Pease AFB, but there is no necessary or logical, non-psychological link between what may have been a legitimate UFO sighting by the Hills, and their subsequent abduction claim. In spite of Barney’s best estimates, their “missing time” could have derived from mistaken time-related calculations regarding their numerous minor and two major stops, or their periodic slow-downs to watch their watcher. Betty’s latter-day claims to hundreds of post-abduction UFO sightings and her public expressions of endearment towards the visitors also provided ever-increasing evidence that hers was a fantasy-prone personality, but probably the greatest shadow of doubt cast over their abduction claim derives from the very mechanism employed to recover their allegedly suppressed memories: hypnosis itself.Though a legitimate therapeutic device in the right hands, hypnosis is not a royal road to “truth” as objectively understood. In 1979, Alvin H. Lawson reported no substantial differences in the narratives between four imaginary, UFO-naïve hypnotic subjects and four “real” abductees across eight situational questions (derived from typical abduction scenarios), compared line-by-line under eight categories. Had the imaginary, hypnotically-elicited narratives been clearly distinct from “real” cases, the data would have supported the argument that “real” cases represented a distinct category of events from the imagined, but that is not what Lawson discovered. Hypnotized subjects were asked to imagine then describe: (i) seeing a UFO; (ii) being aboard the UFO and explaining how that happened; (iii) what they saw while aboard; (iv) any entities seen on board; (v) any physical examination performed by the entities; (vi) any message conveyed to themselves by the entities; (vii) their return from the UFO; and, (viii) any after-effects of the experience. Though the questions and methodology were clearly leading, inasmuch as the patterns which emerged showed an astounding co-variation across all eight categories of narrative analysis, and included details known to abduction researchers but not readily available (in 1977-1979) to their UFO-naïve subjects from pop culture sources, the researchers believed that they had stumbled across “a structure around which subjects fantasize their experiences, following a limited imaginative range which parallels the bulk of “real” abduction cases.”Lawson does not argue that abduction experiences are simply hallucinatory: he suggests instead that there seem to be certain “abduction image constants” which provide a structure that “real” witnesses to those constants may integrate with data from their imaginations, memories and general awareness of UFOs to give rise to a generally patterned, i.e. widely shared, alien encounter narrative. Lawson acknowledges, however, that his model “falls short of explaining major segments of the UFO phenomenon, particularly the nature of the stimulus which initiates the witnesses’ perception of abduction image constants – the first and most mysterious event in the abduction sequence.” So, assuming that “the first and most mysterious event” is never an actual abduction…what might this mean to the Hills?Clearly, the Hill case embraces the eight characteristics of a “real” abduction as outlined by Lawson, but in his carefully worded 14 June 1966 introduction to The Interrupted Journey, in which he held a financial interest, Dr. Simon was walking a semantic and professional tightrope when he wrote that “the charisma of hypnosis has tended to foster the belief that hypnosis is the magical and royal road to TRUTH. In one sense, this is so, but it must be understood that hypnosis is a pathway to the truth as it is felt and understood by the patient. The truth is what he believes to be the truth, and this may or may not be consonant with the ultimate nonpersonal truth. Most frequently, it is.”For a psychiatrist, the truth is any truth, concrete or otherwise, with an impact on the well-being of his or her patients, but Dr. Simon’s position on “the truth” as ordinarily understood was much clearer when he revealed to UFO debunker Philip J. Klass that he did not believe that the Hills had been abducted by aliens, but that they had become genuinely frightened by a bright, star-like UFO which they thought was following them.Insofar as Betty could recall a lot of detail and Barney could not, Dr. Simon did not consider their abduction a “shared experience.” Ignoring both Betty and Barney’s assertions that Barney had kept his eyes closed through much of their ordeal, Dr. Simon believed that Barney was frequently present when Betty recounted both their experience and her nightmares for friends, neighbours and UFO investigators, and that was the source of the abduction narrative which emerged from his regression sessions. It would also account for Barney’s feeling throughout therapy that his recovered memories seemed unreal, like a dream, to the extent that he would doubt whether Betty could have had the sort of conversation she claims to have had with the space “men,” and would even go so far as to question Dr. Simon about the veracity of memories retrieved via hypnosis.During her debriefing, Betty was challenged with a series of seemingly naïve questions by the leader, which also added to the generally dream-like quality of her narrative. An expectation that she might have to explain specific, mundane elements of their conversation – like aging, time, diet and colour - to the alien captain of a spacecraft capable of inter-stellar travel who could conduct sensible communications in English is utterly surreal, but from another perspective those selfsame questions could also be interpreted as subtle tests of Betty’s knowledge of the physical and biological sciences. In time, however, it became apparent that the highlight of Betty’s debriefing was the three-foot-wide, two-foot-high “star map” she was presented upon her having asked the alien leader where “he” was from – a question that abductees typically fail to raise. The map, presumably of star systems, showed heavy lines that were identified as trade routes, solid lines for places visited occasionally and broken lines for expeditions. When challenged, Betty had to admit that she did not know where Earth’s solar system was on the map, i.e. to admit to no knowledge of astronomy, to which the leader offered the Zen-like response, “if you don’t know where you are, then there isn’t any point of telling where I’m from,” and rolled up the map. While undergoing hypnotherapy in 1964 Betty sketched what she could recall of it, with only two erasures, and by 1969 would report that the map had actually been three-dimensional, like a holograph.Relative to their experience as a whole, Betty’s star-map received scant notice until Terrence Dickinson’s lead article in the December 1974 issue of ASTRONOMY magazine, “The Zeta Reticuli Incident,” drew attention to then amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish’s contention that the Hills’ abductors may have come from the six-to-eight billion year-old, binary, Zeta Reticuli star system in the southern constellation Reticulum (The Net), 37 light years from Earth. Fish reasoned that Betty must have been shown a local map, and therefore limited her speculations to the 1,000 or so stars within a 55 light-year radius of Earth. She later narrowed her search to 46 of those 1,000 stellar systems deemed most likely to support life. Then, between August 1968 and February 1973, Fish used coloured beads strung on a frame to create numerous 3-D models until she finally hit upon a match for 15 of the star map’s 16 transit points. Though hardly conclusive and replete with many, many legitimate points of criticism, this must still be acknowledged as an extraordinary accomplishment.According to Marjorie Fish’s interpretation of Betty Hill’s map, Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli represent the hub of the aliens’ activities, and our Sun lies at the end of one of their regular trade routes. Fish was confident that Betty’s 1964 star map was not hoaxed because the position of the triangular formation of Kappa Fornacis, Gliese 95 and Gliese 86.1 in her map were not known prior to the publication of the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars in 1969, and, even if it were, that it would have been unlikely that Betty would have had access to a copy of the Catalog, or would have known how to interpret the data it contained. Given suitable transportation, it is also noteworthy that the routed stars “are almost in a plane; that is, they fill a wheel shaped volume of space that makes star hopping from one to another easy and the logical way to go – and that is what is implied by the map that Betty Hill allegedly saw.”With two exceptions, the Fish-Hill star pattern was also remarkable for containing main sequence stars, like our Sun, in spectral classes deemed favourable for supporting life, all clustered within a relatively small portion of space (about 13% of the sky). The two exceptions were Tau 1 Eridani (an “expeditionary” star on Betty’s map) and Gliese 86.1 (not on any of the alien’s three regular routes) which in 1974 were considered, respectively, too hot and too cold to support life – several years before scientists began to note the widespread existence and significance of extremophiles on Earth. Moreover, one of the 46 stars which should have been on Betty’s map, Zeta Tucanae, was missing “probably because it is behind Zeta 1 Reticuli at the required viewing angle.”When Mark Steggert applied the Perspective Alteration Routine (PAR) visualization software which he had developed at the University of Pittsburgh’s Space Research Co-ordination Center to the star map, he was surprised to find that the pattern derived from his computer program “had a close correspondence to the data from Marjorie Fish.” Similarly, Ohio State University Professor of Astronomy Walter Mitchell and his students used a computer to adopt a perspective looking towards our Sun from beyond Zeta Reticuli, revealing virtually no variations from Fish’s map. Michael Peck, then an astronomy student at Northwestern University in Illinois, wrote a computer program to quantify the degree of similarity between the Hill and Fish maps in terms of their relative X and Y coordinates and found “a correlation coefficient in X of 0.95 and in Y of 0.91,” where a correlation coefficient of one would have been a perfect match. According to Peck, “the possibility that 15 points chosen at random will fall on the points of the Hill map within an error range which would make them as close as the Fish map is about one chance in ten to power fifteen (one million billion).” As a statistical expert at the University of Chicago’s Industrial Relations Center in 1976, David R. Saunders, who Dr. Condon had threatened with professional ruin in February 1968, also concluded that “the chances of finding a match among 16 stars of a specific spectral type among the thousand odd stars near the sun is “at least 1,000 to 1 against,” that is, that there is no more than one chance in 1,000 that the observed degree of congruence would occur in the volume of space under consideration, and further argued that the statistical significance evident between the Fish and Hill maps was equivalent to getting between 6 and 11 consecutive heads in a coin toss, but the reaction wasn’t all sunshine and roses.Carl Sagan, the director of Cornell University’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies, and his research associate, Steven Soter, criticized the projection of lines or “trade routes” onto the Hill and Fish maps when formulating a correlation between the two because it created a bias of the sort lawyers call “leading the witness:” the lines pre-assume the case to be made, and prejudice the outcome. The contrived similarities between the Hill and a computer generated map of the data set in question disappear when the lines are removed, and any residual resemblance is due only to the biased selection of the limited number of stars (15) used for comparison. As a result, Peck’s correlations were “spurious,” an instance of “the enumeration of favourable circumstances.” Sagan and Soter argued that had Peck “selected 15 out of a random sample of, say, 46 points in space, and had he simultaneously selected the optimal vantage point in three dimensions in order to maximize the resemblance, he could have achieved an apparent correlation comparable to that which he claims between the Hill and Fish maps.” Saunders too made too many indefensible assumptions in his calculation of the statistical significance of the degree of similarity between the Hill and Fish maps, with particular regard to his arbitrary downplaying of the magnitude of the selection factor (of 46 stars taken 14 at a time), which would have wiped out the statistical significance of the outcome. Sagan and Soter came to the same conclusion when they examined the negative impact of free choice in vantage point on any determination of the significance of the degree of similarity between the maps: “the Zeta Reticuli argument and the entire Hill story do not survive critical scrutiny.” Basically, Sagan and Soter argued that there were so many potential combinations of stars (239.9 billion for 46 stars selected 14 at a time) and vantage points (182 for each of the selected 14 stars relative to the others), that there was nothing special about the Fish interpretation of the Hill map.Though Mark Steggert was impressed with the accuracy of Marjorie Fish’s model, he also cautioned that data for some of the stars in the Gliese catalog was not definitive for star systems further than 30 light-years from Earth, and that Fish may have come up with quite a different outcome had she relied upon some other source, like the Yale Catalog of Bright Stars. Others, like NASA computer programmer Robert Scheaffer found “the problem with trying to interpret Betty Hill’s sketch is that it simply fits too many star patterns.” Scheaffer pointed out that there had been two patterns suggested before the widespread acceptance of the Fish map, one by Betty Hill herself, who had been impressed by its similarity to a map of the constellation Pegasus which appeared in the New York Times on 18 April 1965. The story which accompanied the map claimed that quasar CTA-102 was a source of intelligent radio signals, but that claim was never validated. Still, Jeffrey L. Kretsch, an Astronomy student at Northwestern University, would argue in 1976 for the uniqueness of the Zeta Reticuli system, since “after searching through a list of stars selected from the Giliese catalog on the basis of life criteria, only one other pair within a separation of even 0.3 light-years could be found,” and “if the other stars in the pattern fit, it is a remarkable association with a rare star system.”Not surprisingly, Marjorie Fish’s effort received scant and purely negative attention. In 2005, Joe Nickell wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer that whereas an “amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish believed she had found matches for some of the dots and circles on Betty’s drawing” which showed Zeta 2 Reticuli as the alien’s home base, “noted astronomer Carl Sagan and a Cornell University graduate student reported that a computer plot of fifteen star positions identified by Fish showed “little similarity” to those marked on Betty’s drawing.” In a similar tone, Francis Wheen would explain for the readers of the 11 June 1997 edition of The Guardian that the “Zeta Reticulans” referred to by one of his credulous critics “comes from an article in the December 1974 issue of Astronomy magazine in which Marjorie Fish, an Ohio schoolteacher, tried to establish where alien kidnappers come from. Using a map which had been briefly glimpsed by an American woman while she was being interrogated by ‘spacemen’ aboard their flying saucer, Fish concluded that they lived on a planet of Zeta 2 Reticuli. The story was demolished most effectively in Philip J. Klass’s book, UFO Abductions: A dangerous game (1989).” A glance at the latter publication reveals that Klass gives the credit for demolishing the Fish-Hill star pattern to Carl Sagan and Steven Soter for the reasons already outlined, as well as to Robert Sheaffer who noted in his book The UFO Verdict (1981) that another amateur astronomer, Charles W. Atterberg, of Elgin, Illinois, “came up with an even closer match of the Hill star-map than did Fish – but with quite a different set of stars.” The “leader’s” hypnotically recalled advice to Betty about her and Barney’s experience comes to mind at this point: “maybe you will remember, I don’t know. But I hope you don’t. And it won’t do you any good if you do, because Barney won’t. Barney won’t remember a single thing. And if you should remember anything at all, he is going to remember it differently from you. And all you are going to do is get each other so confused you will not know what to do. If you do remember, it would be better if you forgot it anyway.”As if to underscore his comments are Betty and Barney’s varying descriptions of the aliens, as highlighted by Jacques Vallee in his Passport to Magonia. According to Betty, as seen in her pre-hypnosis dreams, “most of the men are my height….None is as tall as Barney so I would judge them to be 5’ to 5’4”. Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger [longer] than the average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs – like Jimmy Durante. Their complexions were of a gray tone, like a gray paint with a black base; their lips were of a bluish tint. Hair and eyes were very dark, possibly black…In a sense, they looked like Mongoloids….This sort of round face and broad forehead, along with a certain type of coarseness. The surface of their skin seemed to be a bluish gray, but probably whiter than that. Their eyes moved, and they had pupils. Somehow, I had the feeling they were more like cats’ eyes.” To Barney, however, “the men had rather odd shaped heads, with a large cranium, diminishing in size as it got toward the chin. And the eyes continued around to the sides of their heads, so that it appeared that they could see several degrees beyond the lateral extent of our vision. This was startling to me….[The mouth] was much like when you draw one horizontal line with a short perpendicular line on each end. This horizontal line would represent the lips without the muscle that we have. And it would part slightly as they made this mumumumming sound. The texture of the skin, as I remember it from this quick glance, was grayish, almost metallic looking. I didn’t notice any hair – or headgear for that matter. I didn’t notice any proboscis, there just seemed to be two slits that represented the nostrils.” Betty also had the impression that the “leader” and the “examiner” were different from the crewmembers, but wasn’t sure because she didn’t want to look at the men.Skeptics believe that the aliens’ eyes, which impressed both Betty and Barney, and have since become a mainstay of popular alien imagery, were derivative of “Please Stand By” (later re-titled “The Galaxy Being”), the pilot episode of The Outer Limits (United Artists, 1963-65), which featured a big-eyed, dangerous but friendly radioactive being from Andromeda with an oversized chest and a message: “there is much you have to learn. You must explore! You must reach out! Go to your homes. Go and give thought to the mysteries of the universe. I will leave you now…in peace.” Bruce Rux, the author of Hollywood vs. the Aliens, could find no evidence for government involvement, but believed that preparation for contact with alien visitors “was certainly the personal mission of Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano,” the show’s executive producer and producer, respectively. Others have followed Martin S. Kottmeyer’s lead in pointing triumphantly to another Outer Limits episode, “The Bellero Shield,” which aired on 10 February 1964, just twelve days before Barney began to describe the alien leader’s wraparound eyes. However, the acceptability of those skeptical arguments depends on whether Betty and Barney actually watched one or both of those episodes of The Outer Limits, and on whether Barney’s terror regarding the “leader’s” seemingly hypnotically engaging eyes, which he first noticed at Indian Head when looking at the craft and its occupants through binoculars in 1961, was evident before he was regressed by Dr. Simon in 1964. The record is too muddled to say. Less skeptically but just as speculatively, it may be that the Hills’ abductors capitalize on their unusual eyes to distract attention from their use of sophisticated psychotronic or other devices, like variations on acoustic canons, to render their victims disoriented, compliant, insensitive to pain, paralyzed or even unconscious. Such devices could even be used to project reassuring voices which would seem to come from within the bewildered abductees’ own heads, instructing them to remain calm, to cooperate, that they won’t be harmed – as in Barney’s case – and then to induce amnesia. Many abductees are reluctant to report “induced intra-psychic instructions” perceived as voices in their heads, since anyone who ventures to do so risks the summary dismissal of his or her experience as a “psychological event” absent hard evidence to the contrary – and such evidence has never been forthcoming.