About midnight on September 20th we were driving in a National Forest Area in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. This is a desolate, uninhabited area. At first we noticed a bright object in the sky, which seemed to be moving rapidly. We stopped our car and got out to observe it more closely with our binoculars. Suddenly it reversed its flight path from the north to the south-west and appeared to be flying in a very erratic pattern. As we continued driving and then stopping to watch it, we observed the following flight pattern: the object was spinning and appeared to be lighted only on one side, which gave it a twinkling effect.

As it approached our car, we stopped again. As it hovered in the air in front of us, it appeared to be pancake in shape, ringed with windows in the front through which we could see bright blue-white lights. Suddenly, two red lights appeared on each side. By this time, my husband was standing in the road, watching closely. He saw wings protrude on each side and the red lights were on the wing-tips.

As it glided closer he was able to see inside this object, but not too closely. He did see several figures scurrying about as though they were making some hurried type of preparation. One figure was observing us from the windows. From the distance this was seen, the figures appeared to be about the size of a pencil and seemed to be dressed in some type of shiny black uniform...

It was the beginning of an experience so bizarre that she and her husband were utterly traumatised by it and were plagued by nightmares for years. Betty was a forty-one-year-old child welfare worker. Her husband, Barney, thirty-nine years old, was a mail sorter in Boston and both were active campaigners in the civil rights movement, then gathering support across the United States. The couple had gone on a spur of the moment holiday to Niagara and Montreal and were driving south along Route 3 from Bolebrook. They had stopped to eat at a diner and were near the town of Lancaster when the flying object appeared.

It was not until late November, two months after their close encounter, that Barney came to realise, in discussion with UFO investigators, that a journey along 190 miles of deserted roads and moving generally between 65-70 mph had taken seven hours. This came to be known as 'missing time'. And neither Betty nor Barney Hill could account for it.

Betty's dreams seemed to continue where her conscious memories of the White Mountain night left off. Under hypnosis the couple remembered being stopped on the road by eleven men, the crew of the craft whose lights they had seen. They were taken on board the ship and placed in separate rooms. Each was subjected to a physical examination. In Betty's case, samples were taken of her hair, her earwax, scrapings from her skin. A long needle was inserted into her navel as a sort of pregancy test and she found herself discussing the Universe (of which she knew very little) and the human concept of time with the leader of the crew. Artists' impressions made to Barney's and Betty's specifications show bald-headed beings with mere indentations for ears, large, lidless eyes and vestigial noses.