Free Republic

The University of New Hampshire today is hosting a public forum surrounding a new exhibition called the "Betty and Barney Hill Collection." The Hills were an interracial couple in the 1960s, and the exhibit discusses Barney Hill's civil rights activism. However, the couple is best known for giving the first reported incident of an alleged alien abduction in America. Today, due to television shows and films, the scenario is familiar: UFOs chase down terrified witnesses on a desolate road and take them onto the spaceship to ask them questions or probe them in awkward places. It began one night when...

Almost 50 percent of Americans, according to recent polls, and millions of people elsewhere in the world believe that UFOs are real. For many it is a deeply held belief. For decades there have been sightings of UFOs by millions and millions of people. It is a mystery that only science can solve, and yet the phenomenon remains largely unexamined. Most of the reporting on this subject by the mainstream media holds those who claim to have seen UFOs up to ridicule. On Feb. 24, "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing" takes a fresh look at the UFO...

WHY would a serious journalist like Peter Jennings tackle a silly subject like UFOs? Maybe it's because 40 million Americans can't be wrong. It turns out that 40 million of us have claimed to have seen UFOs, while half — yes, half — of all Americans believe in their existence… < snip > So, why, if millions of people have seen UFOs, are the eyewitnesses immediately reduced to the level of raving loonies (from "lunar")? Interestingly enough, that is the legacy of another successful government PR campaign…< snip > The feds thought they could keep a lid on UFO sightings...

PORTSMOUTH — Betty Hill of Portsmouth, who along with her late husband in 1961, had the first publicized and best-documented UFO experience in the White Mountains, died Sunday in her sleep after a battle with lung cancer. She was 85. On a return trip from Canada, the Hills said they were abducted for two hours by a UFO on Sept. 19, 1961. After going public with their story, the two gained worldwide notoriety. Their story became the subject of a book and later, a made-for-TV movie starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons. They traveled across the country and made...