#TwoLostHours | "Do You Believe In Flying Saucers Now?"
Betty and Barney Hill left Howard's Restaurant in Colebrook, New Hampshire at 10:05 on the night of September 19th, 1961; a light kept pace with their car down U.S. Route 3, and by the time the kitchen clock in Portsmouth read shortly after five, neither of them could remember a thirty-five-mile stretch of the drive. Betty called Pease Air Force Base two days later, and in November two NICAP members who drove up to Portsmouth worked through a sum nobody had done yet: Colebrook to Portsmouth is about a four-hour drive, the Hills had left at ten and gotten home after five, and neither of them could say where the other hours had gone.
From the book “TWO LOST HOURS ON ROUTE 3: The Betty And Barney Hill UFO Abduction, 65 Years Later” by Darren Marlar at https://weirddarkness.com/TwoLostHours
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: October 14, 2026
Speaker 1: This is Two Lost Hours on Route 3 from Weird Darkness.
I'm Darren Marlar. 65 years ago, September 19th, 1961, Betty
and Barney Hill drove through New Hampshire's White Mountains and
arrived home hours later than expected, unable to account for
a missing stretch of time. Strange marks on their car,
a torn dress, and disturbing dreams followed. Under hypnosis, They
described an encounter with beings from another world, but their
psychiatrist remained skeptical. Their story became America's most famous alien
abduction case, inspiring decades of investigation, controversy, and competing explanations.
Drawing on original reports, hypnosis transcripts, and more than 60
years of research, Two Lost Hours on Route 3 explores
what really happened that September night. And... what remains unexplained.
And now, two lost hours on Route 3, the Betty
and Barney Hill UFO abduction, 65 years later. The clock
over the restroom door at Howard's Restaurant in Colebrook, New Hampshire,
read 10.05 when Betty and Barney Hill walked back out
to their car on the night of September 19th 1961.
They had roughly 175 miles of U.S. Route 3 between
them and their house on State Street in Portsmouth, and
Barney figured on pulling into the driveway somewhere between 2.30
and 3 in the morning. The car was a 1957
Chevrolet Bel Air two-door hardtop. Their dashhunt, Delsey, was in
the backseat. They had cut a Montreal vacation short that
afternoon because the city was expensive and the traffic was bad,
and a radial forecast of a hurricane moving up the
coast had made an all-night drive home seem like the
sensible choice. Somewhere south of Lancaster, with a ten-day-old gibbous
moon hanging over the mountains and the planet Jupiter sitting
bright beside it, Betty noticed a point of light below
the moon that seemed to be getting bigger. She watched
it for a while before she said anything. Barney told
her it was probably a satellite or a plane that
had wandered off course. They pulled into a picnic area
near Twin Mountains so the dog could stretch her legs.
At one of the stops that night, Barney took the
pistol out of the trunk before he got out because
the woods were dark and it was bear country. Betty
handed him the binoculars. He looked, and he couldn't make
it a plane. The hills kept driving south, and the
light kept pace with them. They watched it pass behind
the summit of Cannon Mountain, 4,077 feet up and maybe
a mile off, then come out the other side. They
stopped again in Franconia Notch, beneath the old man of
the mountain. At the parking lot for the flume, the
trees cut off their view, so they drove on past
the Indian Head Resort, where Betty noticed a man smoking
behind a screen door, and a little more than two
miles north of North Woodstock, the thing came down over
the road in front of them. It was big by then,
and silent. Walter Webb, the Hayden Planetarium lecturer who would
spend six hours interviewing them a month later, wrote down
what they told him about the shape. A flattened disk
with a row of windows along its rim, hanging perhaps
80 to 100 feet above the ground and a few
hundred feet off the road. Barney stopped the car in
the middle of the highway, took the binoculars, and walked
out into a field to get a better look. He
kept walking. Through the 7x50 lenses, he could see figures
at the windows. Somewhere between 8 and 11 of them
by the count he gave Webb, dressed in shiny black
uniforms with peaked caps like the leather of a German
officer's coat. One of them stood at what looked like
a control lever, glanced over his shoulder, and smiled. Another
kept his eyes on Barney and did not look away.
Barney told Webb the figures were somehow not human. He
said it out loud in the field, too, that he
didn't believe it, that this was ridiculous. And then he
turned and ran back toward the car, repeating that they
were going to be captured, dropping the binoculars on the
way so that the strap broke. Back behind the wheel,
he threw the car into gear and drove, while Betty
craned around to find the object and couldn't see it anymore.
A few miles down the road, the car started to
beep at them. Webb's report described it as a series
of beeping or buzzing sounds, as if in code, coming
from the direction of the trunk. And each beep made
the car vibrate. The Air Force officer who took Betty's
call two days later wrote it down as a sound
like someone had dropped a tuning fork. Then the beeps stopped.
The next thing either of them remembered clearly was the
beeps again. Five or six of them, somewhere around Ashland,
some 35 miles south of where they'd last seen the object.
Betty asked him, Do you believe in flying saucers now?
Barney told her not to be ridiculous, that it hadn't
been a flying saucer. Neither of them could remember the
stretch of road in between, and both had a vague
sense they had turned off the highway at some point.
The kitchen clock in Portsmouth read shortly after five when
they got home. Their watches had stopped. The family account,
as Betty's niece Kathleen Martin tells it, is that a
family photograph shows Betty's watch stopped at 5.16 and that
neither watch ran again. Barney went into the bathroom and,
for no reason he could name, examined his genitals. Betty
put the dress she'd worn on the trip in the
closet and left it there. The dog was trembling under
the seat when they went back out to the car.
Over the next few days, small things accumulated. Barney's good
shoes were scuffed across the toes. There was a cluster
of more than a dozen shiny circles on the trunk lid,
each about the size of a half dollar that nobody
could account for. Betty's sister, Janet, after asking a neighbor
who was a physicist, suggested they hold a compass over
the spots. When they did, the needle spun. The spots
faded over the winter. The dress, when Betty finally took
it out of the closet, was torn along the zipper
and through the lining, its hem ripped on one side
and coated with a pink powder that blew away when
she put it outside in the sun. Betty called Pease
Air Force Base on September 21st. Barney asked her to
leave him out of it. Barney Hill was 39 that September,
born in Newport News, Virginia in 1922, and raised in
Philadelphia as the youngest son of a postal worker with
Army service in the Second World War behind him. His
job was assistant dispatcher on the night shift at the
Boston Post Office, a 60-mile drive each way from Portsmouth.
and he blamed the 120-mile daily round trip for the
ulcer he was being treated for. His blood pressure was
high as well. As a member of the NAACP, in
the years after the drive, he would test New Hampshire's
1961 anti-discrimination law in Portsmouth barbershops, help bring the first
successful lawsuit under it, attend the March on Washington in 1963,
and be appointed to the New Hampshire Advisory Committee of
the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Betty, at 42, was
carrying a caseload of about 120 families as a child
welfare social worker for the state. She had grown up
on a chicken farm in Kingston, born Eunice Elizabeth Barrett
in nearby Newton in 1919, and had gone back to
school as an adult, graduating from the University of New
Hampshire with honors in 1958. The two of them had
married on May 12, 1960, a black man and a
white woman in a small New England city and they
attended South Church, the Unitarian congregation in Portsmouth, whose minister,
John Papendrew, a civil rights liberal, would host the church
discussion groups where the Hills first told the story in
1962 and 1963. Webb, who had no reason to flatter them,
wrote that Barney had a total lack of interest in
or curiosity about flying saucers before that night, and that
Betty had a mild interest in the sky and had
never read a book on the subject. he came away
from the six-hour interview impressed by their intelligence, their apparent honesty,
and their obvious wish to play down the more sensational
parts of what they had seen. Major Paul W. Henderson
of the 100th Bomb Wing at Pease called the Hills
back on the 21st and, by his own account, worked
on the report all night. The document he filed, Air
Force Information Report 100-1-61-19, is the earliest official record of
the case. It places the sighting between midnight and 1 a.m.
on September 20th, near Lincoln, and describes a continuous band
of lights, cigar-shaped, with wings that seemed to appear from
the main body in a V-shape, with red lights on
the tips. The wings, the report says, later appeared to
extend further. The observation lasted about 30 minutes by the
Hill's estimate. The weather and sky were clear, and the
tuning fork sound is written down, along with Barney's own
assessment that he felt somewhat foolish and simply couldn't believe
such a thing could or did happen. It says nothing
about figures at the windows. John Fuller, whose 1966 book
would carry the case to the world, wrote plainly that
Barney had sheepishly avoided mentioning the beings he had seen
when he talked to the Air Force. Five days later,
on September 26th, Betty wrote to Major Donald Kehoe, the
retired Marine and Director of the National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena, after checking Kehoe's book, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy,
out of the Portsmouth Library. That letter did describe figures
scurrying about in shiny black uniforms, and had put the
encounter at about midnight. Henderson's report also carried a radar note.
At 2.14 a.m. on September 20th, the Precision Approach Radar
at Pease had picked up an unidentified aircraft four miles out.
A separate entry recorded a target at 62,000 feet, picked
up by the North Concord Air Force Station in Vermont
the previous afternoon at 5.22 p.m., tracked for 18 minutes
as it moved northwest and then south. the report said
it was not possible to determine any relationship between either
radar return and what the Hills had seen. Project Blue Book,
the Air Force's UFO desk at Wright-Patterson, shuffled its evaluation
of the Hill case more than once. Its index cards,
as later transcribed by NICAP, note a strong inversion in
the area and list a weather inversion, the planet Jupiter,
an optical condition, and insufficient data as evaluations at various points,
and the file's bottom line was that the object was
in all probability Jupiter. When Webb asked, Major Mastin Jacks
at the Pentagon told him the case was carried as
insufficient data and that the object was probably Jupiter. Kevin Randall,
who has read the file itself, notes that it also floats,
and then dismisses the idea of an advertising searchlight playing
off the clouds. Webb's first report, dated October 26th, 1961,
concluded that the Hills were telling the truth, and that
the encounter had happened essentially as they described it. He
was not finished with them. On November 25th, two more
NICAP members drove up to Portsmouth, C.D. Jackson and Robert Homan,
both of whom worked at IBM, and in the course
of going back over the timeline, they worked out loud
through a sum nobody had done yet. Colebrook to Portsmouth
in about a four-hour drive. The Hills had left at
ten and gotten home after five. So where had the
other hours gone? Neither of them could say. Both, according
to Jerome Clark's account of the meeting, described an image
of a fiery orb sitting on the ground and were
told the moon had already set by then. The 35
miles between Indian Head and Ashland were a blank. Martin
dates the family's realization that roughly two hours were unaccounted
for to that November conversation. Before it, she says, the
Hills knew only that they had gotten home late. By then,
Betty was already having the dreams. They started about ten
days after the drive by Fuller's account, closer to two
weeks by Webb's, and ran five nights in a row.
And then they stopped and never came back. Betty wrote
them down on notepaper in early October and typed up
a clean account in November 1961 at a friend's urging.
She hesitated to tell Barney about them at all. In
the dreams, there is a roadblock on a lonely New
Hampshire road and a group of small men in uniform,
eight to eleven of them, standing in the way. She
loses consciousness as they approach the car. She wakes aboard
a craft and is given a complete physical examination while
Barney is taken down a curved corridor for one of
his own. The men are between five feet and five
foot four, in blue military-style uniforms with caps. They have
black hair, Dark eyes, bluish lips, and grayish skin, and
their noses are large. In her own notes, Betty compared
them to Jimmy Durante's. They speak with their mouths in
something like English with an accent. One of them, the leader,
is friendlier than the rest. She is told no harm
will come to her and that she will not remember.
She is shown a book of symbols and a map
of stars, and then the book is taken back. Martin,
who has read the typed account many times, describes the
dream figures as human in appearance, and she is emphatic
that they were not the beings Betty later described under hypnosis.
Skeptics agree that the two descriptions differ, and they draw
the opposite conclusion from it. Thanks for listening. I've been
reading from my book Two Lost Hours on Route 3,
The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Abduction 65 Years Later.
If you'd like a list of sources I used for
this episode and for the book it's narrated from, you
can find the full list at weirddarkness.com slash two lost hours.
Scroll to the bottom of that page for the sources used.
If you'd rather not wait for the next section to
be shared in the podcast, the whole book is on
Amazon in Kindle and paperback. as well as Kindle Unlimited
at WeirdDarkness.com slash books.