Revisiting the Hill Star Map

As those of you know, who visit here regularly, I have been suggesting for years that we revisit the Betty Hill star map. I have thought that Marjorie Fish, who identified the Zeta Reticuli star system as the base of the aliens, did a great job. The shear size of the accomplishment is impressive. The only trouble with it was that she did that decades ago and our knowledge of our section of the galaxy has grown exponentially. In other words, as good as her work was, it is now outdated.

I also thought that, in the world today, with home computers that had more power than those used to put the men on the moon, we should be able to refine the process. Surely someone, somewhere, would be interested enough in this puzzle to revisit the star map. I have received word that such is the case.

In an email from James Hood, I was given the web address of a report that looks at the Hill star map using the latest information. I could find no signature on it (though the name might be embedded in the address), but found it interesting enough to mention here. Maybe someone also interested in the Hill star map, and who has a good knowledge of astronomy, will take a look at it and provide some insight into it. You can see the report here:

http://wolfmagick.com/nebula/zetareticuli/papers/a%20case%20for%20zeta%20reticuli_2.pdf

I will note that the Zeta Reticuli is not the only system identified as the origin of the Hill abductors. Betty Hill herself suggested it was part of the Pegasus constellation with Homan as the center star. There is another interpretation in which Epsilon Eridani is the main star and Groombridge 34 replaces the sun. There is another interpretation that suggested the star map was actually a map of the solar system as it existed in 1961 when the Hills were abducted. I mention all this only because I thought I should note that there is not universal acceptance for the Fish interpretation.

Anyone who has studied the star map, and who has some constructive criticism (and please note the qualifier), let me know what you think. This is one of those puzzles that demands a little bit of our attention from time to time. Something of importance might be embedded in it.

Hill Star Map - Badly Out of Date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).

The Hill/Fish Star Map Revisited

For those who remember, Barney and Betty Hill reported that they had been abducted by alien creatures in 1961. Under hypnotic regression, Betty remembered a star map the alien leader had shown her, but because she didn’t know where the sun was on the map, he didn’t provide any additional information. Marjorie Fish, a very bright woman, set out to find the home world of the aliens, and eventually settled on Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, a double star system some 37 light years from Earth.

The problem for us in today’s world is that Fish made a number of assumptions that are no longer valid, a few that might never have been valid, and she used the newest star catalog available at the time which are no longer accurate. Or, in other worlds, we need to revisit this star map using what we know today.

First, let me point out that NASA has announced that they have found the most Earth-like planet yet. It is the fifth planet circling Kepler – 186 (and is designated as Kepler – 186f), is about ten percent larger than Earth, is cooler than Earth, has a higher level of Carbon Dioxide and orbits its sun in 130 days. For those keeping score at home, Kepler -186 is some five hundred (okay 490, but what’s ten light years, more or less at that distance?) light years from Earth.

Now, why is this important?

Because Kepler – 186 is a red dwarf. According to Fish, she left the red dwarf’s out of her system because, she said:

If they go to one star of a given type, it shows interest in that type star – so they should go to other stars of that type if they are in the same volume of space. An exception to this might be the closest stars to the base star, which they might investigate out of curiosity in the early stages of stellar travel. For example, they would not be likely to bypass five red dwarfs to stop at the sixth, if all six were approximately equal in size, spectra, singleness or multiplicity, etc. Or, if they go to one close G [star type] double, they would probably go to other close G doubles.

This was point seven in her analysis for the alien thought processes and why they would visit certain star systems. She added to this when she wrote:

Concerning point 7, I had ruled out the red dwarfs fairly early because there were so many of them and there were only 12 lined points on the Hill map. If one used red dwarfs in logical consecutive order, all the lines were used up before the sun was reached… If they were interested in red dwarfs, there should have been lines going to Gliese 65 (Luyten 76208) which lies near Tau Ceti and about the same distance from Epsilon Eridani as Tau Ceti, and Gliese 866 (Luyten 789-6) which is closer to Tau Ceti than the sun.

Well, you get the point. Fish, logically rejected the red dwarf stars, but the problem is that we knew almost nothing about them. She assumed that one would be the same as the next and if they traveled to one, they should travel to the next. Her real problem was there were so many of them that if she included them, then all the lines were used… meaning that on the star map, the travel routes (lines of communication in the military world) were accounted for before she reached the sun.

So, I now say that some red dwarfs might include Earth-line planets, while others might not, so a spacefaring race, might find that interesting. They may well bypass five red dwarfs and be interested in the sixth because of the planetary system of that sixth star. We simply don’t know.

In fact, Fish argued a “logic” of what the aliens would do, based, I suppose on what she thought humans would do, but we can’t really make such assumptions. We don’t know what might appeal to an alien race, nor do we know what might tempt them to visit a star system, even if that system circles a red dwarf.

We now know that some red dwarfs are more interesting than others. That alone should tell us that we need to reevaluate Fish’s logic and her identification of Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli as the home world of the aliens who abducted the Hills.

In fact, we don’t even know if the sun was on that map. The alien leader might have just pulled up one to show her the complications of travel through three dimensional spaces. It would also seem that he would be able to produce a three dimensional map that would have been more representative of interstellar flight than the two dimensional map he had or rather what Hill reports... and if it had been three dimensional but Hill represented in two dimensions, what sort of errors might that have produced?

Or, to put a point on it, now is the time, using our updated knowledge of the galaxy around us, our discovery of other planets in other star systems, and what I see as a flaw in the logic, it is time to revisit this. Given our personal computing power, it would seem that such a task would be much simpler than the one that faced by Marjorie Fish. Maybe a reevaluation of the Fish/Hill star map will yield new information and while it might not, we should, at the very least, look.  

The Betty Hill Star Map - Revisited, Again

I was reading an article by John A. Johnson in the latest Sky & Telescope (which suggests something about my eclectic interests) and was struck by his opening comments. He suggested that an alien astronomer searching for Jupiter-like planets would not be inclined to look at our solar system. And, he mentioned that if you were searching for small, rocky planets, then you would be more likely to find those orbiting dwarf stars.

What has this to do with us, you might ask.

Glad you did. See, back in the 1970s Marjorie Fish, in attempting to find the star system from which the abductors of Barney and Betty Hill originated, made a model of our section of the galaxy. She assumed, and I’m not sure that it was a bad assumption at that time, that those aliens’ home world would be close to us, galactically speaking. They probably didn’t come from a world across the galaxy, though when we begin to speak of interstellar flight, we really have nothing on which to base our assumptions. Once you have solved the problems of interstellar travel, the distances, however great, might not mean all that much. We just don’t know.

But I digress...

When Fish put together her model, she ignored the red dwarf stars because there were so many of them in the vicinity of Earth and they probably didn’t have anything interesting going on around them anyway. Astronomic thinking at that time suggested that dwarf stars wouldn’t have planetary systems. We now know there are planets circling many of these stars.

What all this means, simply, is that the Fish model, and the conclusion that some of the aliens originate from Zeta I and Zeta II Reticuli has been superceded by better information. The evidence that suggested this is no longer accurate. Fish needed to include those dwarf stars in her models.

Again, this isn’t a criticism of the work done by Fish. At the time she constructed her models and did her research, she had the best information available. In today’s world we know that some of her basic assumptions were wrong.

And I haven’t even mentioned that the newest star catalogs have revised the distances to some of the stars that she did use and that earlier information has been found to be inaccurate. In other words, some of the stars that she included in her survey are now outside the parameters that Fish set.

This means that we can no longer say, with any degree of certainty, with any degree of confidence, that the Zeta Reticuli system is the home of any alien race. Until this research is redone, we can no longer say that we know where some of the aliens originate. The evidence just is no longer there.