Betty Hill and Alien Books

I am in something of a quandary. For those who had read Reflections of a UFO investigator, you know that I interviewed Carroll Wayne Watts about his encounters with, shall I say it? Men from Mars. It was clear that Watts had a limited imagination. He suggested that the space traveling aliens used paper maps, when an electronic survey would have been much better… Just look at what we can do with our satellites, spy planes and aerial photography. His descriptions seemed to be drawn from 1950s science fiction movies rather than a tour of an advanced, alien spacecraft.

Where am I going with this?

For an upcoming interview, I have been reviewing the Hill abduction. As those of you who follow this blog, you know I’m more than a little skeptical of the Star Map that Betty Hill drew. There are four different interpretations of it, with the Fish model suggesting the Zeta Reticuli double star system as the leading contender. You can read about that elsewhere on this blog.

Alien from "Hocus Pocus and
Frisby."

You might also remember that I have suggested that the illustration of the aliens that Barney provided is reminiscent of the aliens shown on the Twilight Zone episode, “Hocus Pocus and Frisby.” Betty had asked Barney at one point if he had been watching the Twilight Zone, though she said that she had never seen the program herself.

And, let’s not forget that in The Interrupted Journey, she described the aliens, saying, “Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger (longer) than average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs – like Jimmy Durante’s. (page 298 in the hardback edition).” Her later descriptions are somewhat different.  

Just so that I can again be accused of being an “abduction propagandist,” I noticed something else in one of the sessions that Betty had with Dr. Benjamin Simon. She was describing her talk (telepathic communication?) with one of the aliens. She wanted something for a souvenir, to help validate her

Jimmy Durante

story. He seemed agreeable and she looked around for something. She said, “…there wasn’t much around – but on a cabinet there was a book, a fairly big book. So I put my hand on the book and I said, ‘Could I have this?’ And he told me to look in the book and I did. It had pages, it had writing, but nothing like I had ever seen before. It looked almost like a – I don’t know – it wasn’t a dictionary – maybe a – it had the – the writing didn’t go across, it went up and down (page 172).”

I’m thinking now, “A book? With pages? A book made of paper and writing that she would later suggest looked like Japanese.” And while I understand that it looked Japanese but certainly wasn’t, I’m wondering now why they would have a book at all. I can’t tell you the last time I actually bought a book that was printed on paper. I now get them digitally, on my iPad. I have dozens of them that I can haul around easily and they take up no real space… and that would be something important on a spacecraft. Saving space and weight. A data retrieval system that is virtually weightless and doesn’t take up space would be ideal. I certainly wouldn’t want to carry around any books.

I have a one terabyte external hard drive. I mention this because, on it, I have the Project Blue Book files. I have the vast majority of the more than 12,000 cases (though I have found a few minor gaps) and thousands of pages of administrative files. On that same hard drive, I have most of The A.P.R.O Bulletins, CUFOS IUR, NICAP’s UFO Investigator and the MUFON Journal beginning with the issues known as SKYLOOK. It also holds several dozen UFO books, including the manuscript versions of many of my own.

The point is that the hard drive is only slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes but not as thick. I can slip it into my pocket and carry to conferences, if the mood moves me. No matter where I am, I have access to a huge amount of data that not so long ago, would have been difficult to review.

To make this worse, and as I have said many times, my cell phone is more powerful than Star Trek’s communicator. I have access to all of human knowledge through the Internet. True, I have to ask for the right information, and sometimes there is a fee to access it, but it’s all there, in my cell phone which is even smaller than that external hard drive that I just mentioned.

Back in the 1960s, when Dr. Simon was treating the Hills and John Fuller was writing his book, no one thought in terms of digitally stored data. Having a book, and something that might have been a paper star chart (or some other flexible material that was rolled up) didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Astronauts, pilots and nearly everyone else thought of data retrieval in terms of something printed. But today, with my desk covered with electronic devices that give me access to so much information, I have to wonder why a spacefaring race would deal with books and paper. When Betty talked about a book in the 1960s, no one thought about that being unusual. Today, well, you have to wonder.

Is this a major problem with the Hill abduction? Nah. It’s just something that struck me as I was reading parts of Fuller’s book. Everything we need is available digitally with no need for ink and paper. There are schools that no longer teach cursive because that is now an obsolete form of communication.

And all that just makes me wonder about that book just laying around on that cabinet in an alien ship. Wouldn’t everything be available digitally? Wouldn’t they have advanced beyond pen and paper? Would they be carrying books? Did they even use it if they are telepathic… but that’s a question for another time.