Hill Star Map - Badly Out of Date

Given some recent astronomical discoveries, I thought it time to revisit the Hill abduction and the connection to Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli. These stars were identified by Marjorie Fish as the home of the aliens who abducted Betty and Barney Hill decades ago and have become so embedded in UFO lore that it is accepted with no proof whatsoever. But the information and criterion used to

Hill Star Map 

create the three-dimensional models Fish used to identify the home world of the aliens is now badly out of date.

In creating those models, Fish made ten assumptions. I had always worried about some of those, especially the one that arbitrarily eliminated the red dwarf stars. I worried about including only main sequence stars that were near matches for our sun but rejected those younger, larger main sequence stars. I didn’t like the assumption that a spacefaring race that visited one type of star would visit those stars of a similar type but ignored those that were too different.

Now, I understood her reason for rejecting those red dwarves. There were just too many of them and if they were included, then the model would be so cluttered that the pattern in Betty Hill’s star map would be found repeatedly. Since it was considered unlikely that red dwarves would have anything of interest to a spacefaring race, such as planets that could support life, they were rejected. Fish wrote, “For example, they would not be likely to bypass five red dwarf stars to stop at the sixth, if all six were approximately equal in size, spectra, singleness or multiplicity, etc.”

Marjorie Fish interpretation of the Hill Star Map

Well, if you can actually understand the motivations of an alien race, that might have some relevance… or, if all those things were basically equal, but the sixth happened to have a planet with some rare mineral or was a planet that was orbiting in the so-called “Goldilocks” zone, then that might draw their attention.

According to Fish, that if these aliens were visiting double stars as suggested by another interpretation of the Hill map they would be expected to visit others. Fish wrote, “Since Atterberg’s pattern [one of those who proposed an alternative to Fish’s model] include a number of relatively close doubles (61 Cygni, Struve 2398, Groombridge 34 and Kruger 60), there should also be a line to Alpha Centauri – but there is not.”

As many learned in school, other than the sun, Alpha Centauri is the closest star to the Earth, except that it isn’t actually the closest. That honor goes to Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that might be gravitationally linked to Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, which is a double star. The point here, is that we have a red dwarf that might be seen as part of the Alpha Centauri “system.”

Why bring all this up now? It was just announced by astronomers that they had found a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri that was in the “Goldilocks Zone.” According to an article in the New York Times, “One astronomer likened it to a flashing neon sign. ‘I’m the nearest star, and I have a potentially habitable planet!’”

There might be problems with this planet. It orbits its sun in something like eleven days, according to one source, but if it is in the Goldilocks Zone, it would have liquid water on it and that might be a very good reason for a spacefaring race to visit it while bypassing a half dozen other red dwarf stars.

This might be the best reason yet for rejecting the Fish interpretation of the Hill map. Some of her basic assumptions are in error. She couldn’t know why aliens might visit one star and bypass another. Maybe the one system was filled with dead planets and no water… or important minerals. Maybe the next is filled with things that interest that alien race.

And while I’m on this kick, how about this? I have always been worried about the assumption that the sun was on the map, connected by the lines. Why? Maybe this is their first time here and they were surprised to find a technological civilization. Or maybe the alien leader just grabbed the first map he had, figuring that this terran civilian would have no idea what she was seeing, so it didn’t matter. Or maybe her memory of the map was off so that we now have a distorted view. Or, for the skeptics out there, maybe she just “dreamed” this up because she first “remembered” the map during a dream.

For those interested, I believe it is time to reevaluate the Fish interpretation of the Hill star map, which I have actually been saying for years. There are now too many problems with it for us to continue to consider it reliable. (This also means that I must now reject one of the elements of Alien. They found themselves at the Zeta Reticuli system where the alien waits in ambush.) That little note is irrelevant but what is not is that the Fish Model and interpretation of the Hill star map is now badly out of date, is wholly unreliable because of that and must be rethought. The bottom line is the map does not provide us with any information about the aliens or their home world… we are now back to where we were before Marjorie Fish (which, of course, is not her fault).