Exhibition of Betty and Barney Hill Collection Opens at UNH; Couple Claimed to be Abducted by Aliens

The University of New Hampshire will host a public forum and celebrate the opening of the Betty and Barney Hill Collection exhibition Friday, April 17, 2009. The forum and exhibition highlight the couples reported alien abduction in 1961, and Barney Hills civil rights activism in New Hampshire in the 1960s.

The public forum, Betty and Barney Hill: Tales of Alien Abduction and Civil Rights Activism in New Hampshire, begins at 1 p.m. in the Memorial Union Building, Room 334/336.

Following the forum, UNH celebrates the opening of the Betty and Barney Hill Collection exhibition with a reception at 3:30 p.m. in Milne Special Collections and Archives and The University Museum, Dimond Library, Level 1. All events are free and open to the public.

The exhibit features Junior, the leader of the aliens depicted in a sculpture and drawings, the dress Betty wore the night of the abduction, notebooks, photographs, and documents about the abduction, as well as materials commemorating Barney Hills work in the NAACP and on the New Hampshire Advisory Committee for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Speakers include Kathleen Marden, Betty Hills niece, who will present Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience: The True Story of the Worlds First Documented Alien Abduction; J. Dennis Robinson, editor of SeacoastNH.com, who will discuss Betty Hills fame as the First Lady of Flying Saucers; and Valerie Cunningham, founder of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, who will talk about Barney and Betty Hill: The Civil Rights Story.

The events are sponsored by the UNH Center for New England Cultures Heritage New Hampshire Lecture Series, which is supported by an endowment from Heritage New Hampshire.

The Betty and Barney Hill collection preserves two great New Hampshire stories. Barney Hill, an African-American U.S. postal employee, was a leading figure in the New Hampshire Civil Rights movement. At a time of segregated public facilities in Portsmouth in the early 1960s, he worked to ensure that the civil rights movement ended segregation in the North even as the eyes of the nation were on dramatic events in the South, said David Watters, director of the Center for New England Culture at UNH.

Betty Hill was a state social worker and a white woman whose mixed-race marriage was unusual at the time, Watters said. What might have been a relatively private life for the couple changed forever when the story of their supposed abduction and examination by aliens in a spacecraft, not many miles below the Old Man of the Mountain, became public in 1965.

The Betty and Barney Hill Collection at UNH consists of thousands of items stored in 87 folders, including correspondence, personal journals and essays, manuscripts, newspaper clippings, photographs, slides, films, audio tapes and artwork. For more on the collection, visit

http://www.library.unh.edu/special/index.php/betty-and-barney-hill.

UNH is a fitting place for the collection, since it connects to the growing collection of New Hampshire African American materials. The alien abduction collection will always be the primary source for study of the first and most famous case of this interesting American phenomenon, Watters said.

The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea and space-grant university, UNH is the states flagship public institution, enrolling 11,800 undergraduate and 2,400 graduate students.

Article & photos:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/550989/

Academia examines an alien encounter

By CLYNTON NAMUO
New Hampshire Union Leader Correspondent
13 hours, 57 minutes ago

A DISC-LIKE CRAFT, unearthly creatures with almond-shaped eyes and, some time later, dormant memories of abduction coaxed forth via hypnosis.

This is not the synopsis of an "X-Files" episode, though it very well could be. It is the story of Betty and Barney Hill, two of the most celebrated, and some say credible, supposed alien abductees in history.

Staunch civil rights activists who campaigned for Lyndon B. Johnson and sat at his inauguration as invited guests, the Hills' lives changed on Sept. 19, 1961, when they were allegedly abducted and taken aboard an alien craft while driving home to Portsmouth from Montreal.

The alleged encounter eventually turned the Hills into international celebrities as it hit the press. Although Barney died in 1969, Betty spent the next few decades immersed in UFO culture until her death in 2004....................

Very good article, photos and (currently) not so good comments here:

http://www.theunionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Academia+examines+an+alien+encounter&articleId=17add72b-f659-40f4-86c8-83dba8b510e6