Ever since I learned about Betty and Barney Hill, I’ve vaguely assumed, without really thinking about it, that the creators of The Flintstones named Betty and Barney Rubble after them, as some sort of obscure pop-culture homage.
Today, while puttering around the internet, it finally occurred to me to check out whether my assumption had ever been confirmed. What I found, though, blew my mind: Betty and Barney Rubble came first. The Flintstonespremiered in 1960, while the Hills reported that they were abducted in 1961.
Do you all understand what this means? The aliens were working in Hollywood, and they already had their eyes (their big featureless gray eyes) on the Hills by 1960! This puts the introduction of the Great Gazoo into a whole different perspective.
I’m the reverse: I didn’t realize until just now that Betty and Barney Hill were their real names. I’d assumed they were pseudonyms to protect the real people’s privacy and they took the names from the cartoon characters.
Betty was not a who’re. I don’t care what Rush Limbaugh says.
Did anybody see the movie with Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones? From what I’ve read it was a fairly accurate depiction of their claims. Of course it was a made for TV movie in the '70s when von Danichen was getting book so it does little to show the skeptical side.
My cousin lives near Portsmouth and knows quite a few people who knew Betty (Barney died a long time ago) and none of them doubt her intelligence or her honesty; even if they don’t believe her story they believe she believed it.
The notion that people only tell the truth under hypnosis is a strangely prevalent one. It happens all the time- even if they really are hypnotized it’s a dreamlike state and it’s easy to confuse memories and imagination. I have no way of knowing obviously if this happened with the Hills, but does anybody remember the past life regression craze where people routinely knew they were Elizabeth I and or Ramses II in their past lives because they remembered it under hypnosis?
In addition, the Hills’s psychologist, who did the hypnotizing, never believed they were reporting actual events. There were some psychological issues involved (they were a mixed-race couple at a time when that was even illegal in some states) and he figured the alien contact story was a way of them working out their issues.
I saw the movie when I was around eight years old, and it Freaked. Me. Out.
I mean, what the hell; a black person was married to a white one?
Kidding. The reenactment (so to speak) of the abduction scared the bejeezus out of me.
As far as the hypnosis goes, apparently Barney changed his story several times under hypnosis, presumably from Betty pressing him to remember things the way she did. Investigators have correlated some of the details he added later, such as the aliens having “wraparound” eyes, to TV and movies that he’d recently seen.