h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Zeta Reticuli - Binary Stars and UFO Legend - A87825801
Author: Galaxy Babe - eclectic editor - U128652

Shagbark touched upon this story in his Reticulum constellation article but I always thought it deserved an Entry of its own.

GB

Brilliant! Thanks for doing this.

Thanks to this article, I've now seen the Betty and Barney Hill film from US TV;;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH5YRtcgzQ4

What a fascinating couple.

However Betty happened upon the star map of Zeta Reticuli, it's a pretty cool story.

thanks Dmitri

I thought this article might appeal to you

I had thought about some conclusions maybe in the form of questions but thought I'd let the facts of the story speak for themselves. From that film on YouTube they didn't seem a likely couple to actively seek publicity.

Far from ticking one article off my list, I've now added a few more

GB

Yeah - so many UFOs, so little time...

I agree, though. The important thing to Betty and Barney Hill was to validate the fact that they weren't crazy. After that, MUFON could duke it out with the Air Force, as far as they were concerned, I think.

To me the only interesting thing in the story is the map, and you say very little about it. Anybody can claim they have been abducted by aliens, and since they offer no evidence that this has happened, there is no reason we should believe them.

But Betty presented a map, and all you say about it is that someone proposed that the "star map began from zeta2 Reticuli". Do you mean it was a map of the stars around zeta2 Reticuli? How well does her map actually match those stars? Could she have known about this area of the sky before she reported the encounter? Is it the case that if you draw a random collection dots, it is sure to match some stars in the sky?

I think this is fascinating.

I wondered why there was a gap of four years between the Hill's strange encounter and the report in the newspaper. Did something else trigger the newspaper's interest?

It's probably wise not to speculate about the reasons for the Hill's experience - assuming no 'real' aliens were involved.

I'm confessing complete incompetence when it comes to star maps. I can't make head or tail of them myself. But it might help to find a reliable copy of Betty Hill's. Here's one I turned up on a blog - about a scifi movie, of all things:

http://michaelsheiser.com/UFOReligions/2013/03/betty-hills-star-map-zeta-reticuli-prometheus/

Now, you can decide whether the people who said it matched were reaching or not., because I have no idea.

There's a similar story among the tinfoil-hatted that the Dogon people of Mali knew about the existence of a binary star system that wasn't obvious to the naked eye.

Here's one version of it:

http://www.unmuseum.org/siriusb.htm

Now, that one could be explained, after all, as information handed down from Egyptian astronomers over time. But according to Betty Hill's interviews, she and the alien had quite a discussion about where he was from. And she admitted to this alien that she personally couldn't find Sol on a star map,etierh.

I'm not saying the Hill story proves anything, other than that stranger things happen than you find in y our breakfast cereal. But the star map did seem to puzzle people.

There's an EGE on the Dogon people, and Sirius B. A2754524



Newspapers - they could have been putting off publishing the story until a slow news day.

Betty knew nothing of the stars, the Hills never named zeta Reticuli, that was proposed by Ms Fish. They didn't say they were abducted by aliens either, the story only came out under hypnosis.

I find the star map puzzling, I have no idea how you would trace a journey from zeta Reticuli to Earth or even why you'd do it. A one-way journey at the speed of light would take 40 years, allowing for space jams.

The 3 maps are compared here http://www.nicap.org/articles/hillzeta.htm if anyone's that interested in finding out more

That's fascinating, Thanks! <biggrin? And useful to dunces like me.

Thanks for this entry, Galaxy Babe. I think you did a great job of contextualizing an interesting phenomenon. The movie was really interesting and I appreciated your account. I am in awe of Betty who tried to get something from them to prove that it happened! That was one courageous lady. They really seemed to love each other. The acting was terrific in the movie. I am glad that the hypnotherapy seemed to help them cope with whatever did happen to them.

Thanks Elektra, I'm glad you enjoyed my article

Yes that was one feisty and gutsy lady and I found that film quite riveting. Being an interracial couple at that time you'd think they'd have done anything not to bring attention to themselves.

Ian pointed out something I hadn't thought of: when I said "why would the aliens travel almost 40 light years to perform medical experiments on one black man and one white woman, then go back home, or on to the next point on their star map?" Ian said, weren't the Hills hypnotised (by the aliens) to forget? I said yes. He said, well, how do we know they didn't hypnotise a lot more people, who either didn't remember so couldn't tell their stories, or didn't try to get hypnotherapy to unlock their memories?

GB

I have to admit I don't like this entry.

A couple make a ridiculous claim under hypnosis, that they were abducted and examined by aliens, although no evidence for aliens visiting Earth has ever been found.

Their two accounts don't even match each other, one claiming the abductors to be humans dressed as Nazis.

One of them produces as 'evidence' a star map which she doesn't understand. Someone else claims that this matches a region of the sky around Zeta Reticuli, but analysis of this shows it to be not true.

Why is this worthy of reporting?

Does analysis of this star map show the claim to be untrue?

If so, why did someone say it was Zeta Reticuli in the first place? Mrs Hill didn't, she couldn't read it.

I'm just asking the experts here.

The story obviously has been inspirational enough for Universal to invest a fairly large sum of money in recreating it in a film format, namely The UFO Incident.
If, like me, you don't believe in or s or their continued fascination with probing people, you probably don't believe in the existence of dragons. That doesn't mean that h2g2 can't have an article about dragons. Alternatively, Elrond the Half-Elven is a fictional character that only appears in the books of one author and their film adaptations – yet someone seems to have written about him.

This isn't my favourite GB article of all time, I'm afraid; the first 3 paragraphs are scientific, the second three are speculative. That doesn't quite gel for me. But it is openly speculative, and obvious as to what is verifiable fact and not. As readers aren't lulled into believing that as what has come before is true, the second half is also true, I have no objection.

Honestly, though, I can't help but feel that, with their being infinite number of stars, chances are you could match any hand-drawn map with a region of space. If I drew a map showing where all the postboxes and phoneboxes in my home town are located (without showing the roads), with the postboxes marked as big stars and phoneboxes marked as little stars, and gave that map to someone like Marjorie Fish, telling her I received inspiration from the stars, I can't help but suspect that a match somewhere in space would be found...

(That makes the Post Office a binary star system. But is there intelligent life there...?)

<BB<

"Does analysis of this star map show the claim to be untrue? " - some sites say it does, other sites say it doesn't.

I think I might have to do my own analysis of the star map.[digs out a half-baked program written a few years back for analysing star patterns from different viewpoints...]

OK, I haven't verified this myself. But an article by Armagh Planetarium, who I would believe - http://www.armaghplanet.com/blog/betty-hills-ufo-star-map-the-truth.html - says that:

1. Fish's analysis was reasonable at the time using the data she had.

2. More up to date information on the distances of the stars, and new details about the stars such as that some of them are binary or variable mean that Fish's identification of the stars is completely wrong.

3. Fish herself acknowledged this in print.

The Armagh Planetarium's explanation is really good.

I think it would be a good idea to include this explanation - and sum up the controversy and its aftermath.

I see now the reason why this story needs to be told. It was the first alien abduction, or the first one that was believed. It was the originator of the whole myth of the 'Zetas', and it was considered at the time that it was a story which had actual evidence, although this evidence was subsequently found to be false.

Thanks for the additional information

I've read up and added the following paragraph:


In the early 1990s more accurate measurements were taken concerning the stars in the immediate neighbourhood of our Sun. This data was used to update Marjorie Fish's interpretation of Betty Hill's star map. Some stars which Fish had originally dismissed were no longer ineligible, and some were further away than had been thought, so the theory that the stars matched a route from zeta1 Reticuli collapsed. An article called 'Goodbye, Zeta Reticuli' appeared in the Fortean Times of November 2008 debunking the Hill/Fish star map, following which Marjorie Fish publically stated that she 'now felt that the correlation was unlikely'. However, dismissing the zeta Reticuli map and denying the Hills' kidnap story hasn't made it go away. Evil and benevolent versions of grey aliens abound in popular culture and feature in sci-fi productions such as Stargate SG-1, The X-Files and Babylon 5. It was a grey alien which was the subject of Alien Autopsy, a film starring Ant & Dec, who acted out a reconstruction of what supposedly happened to the unfortunate occupants of the UFO which allegedly crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947.


GB

Oh, good, you found The Fortean Times on the subject.