Original subtitles

(Ominous ambient music)

(Computer bleeps)

(Metal scrapes)

(Alien grunts)

(Alien screams)

(Metal scrapes)

(Alien grunts)

(Air whooshes)

(Computer bleeps)

- Oh, we would cross over the water into New Hampshire.

I think we started to see this light, following.

Actually, in the very beginning,

I noticed a bright light in the sky.

(Computer bleeps)

We thought it was a party,

so we thought, we gotta get out to look at it.

And that's when it changed direction,

and started coming in, towards us.

I'm trying to attract the attention of this craft.

I'm telling it, "come on, here! Hi!"

I got the window down. I'm yelling to him,

"hey! Hey! Over here!"

(Ominous cinematic music)

And at that point, it left the top of the mountain,

came out, over the highway,

and stopped in midair, directly in front of us.

Barney got out with the binoculars,

in an attempt to identify the craft.

And when he looked up,

he saw a circular window,

and he saw these... (Alien grunts)

Standing behind the window, looking down at him,

and he became frightened,

ran back to the cars,

and he thought they were trying to capture him.

And we were speeding down the highway to avoid capture.

And Barney turned off, onto a side road.

And here, with a group of men

he had seen on the craft,

standing in the middle of this road,

blocking our way.

And naturally, he had to stop the car,

and they came up in two groups,

took us out of the car,

passing the woods, to where the craft was on the ground.

- There's nothing on earth quite like

the white mountains of New Hampshire.

Beautiful and rugged.

Endless forest and rock.

Stark contrasts everywhere you look.

On September 20th, 1961,

Betty and Barney hill claimed they were abducted by a ufo.

And in the waning years since the event,

they've become ufological icons.

We've come to the white mountains

to experience a place with a rich history of ufo sightings,

that stretches back into the 1800s.

Amongst the crew with us for this trip

are aleksandar petakov,

and skeptically-minded investigator, Adam duggan.

I've avoided looking too deeply

into the abduction side of the subject,

maybe because I just didn't find the time,

or maybe because, deep down, I'm aware there's something

so primal and terrifying about it.

People around the world have claimed for centuries

to have been taken aboard craft of unknown origin,

and been mutilated, maimed, and experimented upon.

If I'm going to look into this topic,

then there's no better place to start

than where it all began.

(Crickets chirp) (Owls hooting)

(Glitchy cinematic music)

(Heart beats) (Static crackles)

The white mountains

are a part of the appalachian mountain range,

that covers almost a quarter of the state, in New Hampshire,

and stretch into Maine.

It's home to mt. Washington:

The highest peak in the northeastern United States.

By far, this region's most infamous ufological event

was the Betty and Barney hill abduction,

which occurred just down the street from franconia,

where we're staying while in the area.

- They had larger eyes than ours,

smaller nose,

a smaller mouth.

No protruding part of the ear, and no hair.

I was taken into this first room,

and it was quite bare.

There was a small table. There was a stool.

They put me on the stool,

checked my eyes, ears, nose, throat.

My feet. My hands.

And then, he put me on a table,

and said they were gonna check my nervous system.

And then, he tried to insert

a needle-like instrument in my navel, which caused pain.

Then, the examiner left,

went into the room where Barney was.

With Barney, most of the exam was the same as mine,

except they were interested in his bone structure,

and they were feeling all up and down his spine,

his arms, basically.

- There's a whole subset of people within ufology

who

support, believe in, and write about

and research the large number of cases of abductees.

And when I use that term,

what that means is that it's someone who claims

that they have been abducted by aliens,

sometimes on more than one occasion,

and typically, studied physically,

with medical examinations, and so forth.

- In terms of abductions,

I think it's an area of these phenomenon

that many people aren't willing to go to,

or to face the fact that it's happening,

again, now, recently.

Kind of scares me.

You know? I thought, maybe, this was something

that happened at one point in time,

and it was just a weird phenomenon that was occurring,

and that we'd never deal with it again.

It's a really dark path.

- There are thousands, if notー

and I think, most likely, hundreds of thousands of people,

acrossーwell, right here in the United States, itself,

who believe that they've had experiences with aliens.

It's kind of where the contactee movement went,

where, as opposed to just messages,

these people feel that they are being taken into a craft,

that medical experiments are being done on them,

and then, they're being dropped off, again.

- I was probablyーi was one of the first in the country

to investigate alleged abduction cases.

We have numerous reports around western Pennsylvania.

We could have spent, full-time,

working on just abduction reports,

'cause you can spend weeks and months and years on one case,

and we have multitudes of reports coming in, all the time.

So, we did the best we could.

- To my, you know,

my way of looking at things,

it's Betty and Barney hill,

and their case that really introduces the idea

of an involuntary period of time,

where you're experimented upon,

shown various things, and then,

taken back to your normal life,

with some sort of missing time.

- Betty and Barney hill's experience opened the door

for a flood of similar reports to begin coming in.

Where previously, encounters with aliens

had been relegated to the accounts

of those in the contactee movement,

there was now another way

for those who claimed experiences with extraterrestrials

to quantify it for the general public.

The hills reported physical and emotional ramifications

that flew in the face

of the typically benevolent space brothers

encountered by contactees,

and seemed to point toward a force

that approached humanity with detached clinical precision.

Despite the popularity of the hill story,

it would be decades before the abductee phase of ufology

really kicked off.

In the meantime, investigators and researchers

began to look at some historical reports,

in the context of a post-abduction world.

- There was a very important, I think, and famous case,

which is the James everall case.

1638,

down, along the Charles riverー

the muddy river in Cambridge, Boston area.

And it was a case, where James everall,

he and two others went out,

one night, and they went downriver.

They're gonna go out, and inspect hides

that'd come in, on their boat,

in a lighter, which is a small,

probably like a rowboat-type device, to get out.

And what was curious is,

is the light was seen over charlestown, that night,

that was in the shape ofー

they called it the shape of a swine, which is interesting.

There's a green light that ran to and forth,

back from charlestown, over Boston,

down, towards watertown,

and the only thing I can think of of that shape,

it's obviously a cigar shape.

The most interesting part of it was

is that this took place for over two hours, apparently,

because James everall mentioned

that he and his two companions, two hours later,

after seeing the green light, found themselves up,

back where they had begun their journey, against the tide.

And so, the tide was, say, like, outgoing,

and now, two hours later, after seeing this,

they're back where they started,

against that.

- It almost seems like a very early...

- I think it's a classic thing,

of two hours of missing time,

what we would call today, like with Betty and Barney hill,

an alien abduction.

- The thing that I find the most compelling about it,

really,

is that we can, again, tie this into historical accounts,

delve back into folklore,

and look at the concept that, you know, in early days,

people in Europe talked about the fae,

and they described abduction stories.

"Oh, I met these little people,

"and I had a visit with them, in their banquet hall,

"and then, when I came back,

"I thought I had been gone two hours,

"but it was three days."

- So, oftentimes, people will point towards ufo stories,

or abduction stories being incredibly similar

to fae or fairy stories that we have from the British isles.

One of the ways that this comes out

is through what they called changeling stories,

which is fairies come in the night,

to replace the baby of a woman who has recently given birth,

and the woman knows that it's not her child.

Either it's crying all the time,

or the baby was crying all the time,

and now, it's completely silent.

Like, behaviorally, the child is different,

and without an explanation for that,

she offers up the idea that it's a changeling.

More often than not, this is a very poor end for the child,

where it's then abandoned in the woods, for example,

because the mother knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt,

it is not her child, but instead,

it's a child of the fae.

- There are some old abduction cases,

but they're very rare.

And what you get, far more often, in the cases of,

even like, the airship run,

and the airship flaps.

There was a sense, in which people could interact

with the occupants of those vehicles,

that these strange ships, whatever they were,

would occasionally land, and people would be invited

to come onboard, and even tour the facilities, as it were.

So, it really isn't until much later

that these start to become a situation

where the abductee is taken, against their will.

- I remember one case,

and this would've been north of Pittsburgh,

and I did have an opportunity to go interview this person,

'cause this always stuck with me,

and this is probably late 1960s.

This fellow would get up early during the nightー

early morning hoursーand would go out

in the middle of the woods,

and allegedly, was going to board this object

that was landed on the ground,

and had various type of physical experiments,

and whatever going on.

The one thing I remembered he kept mentioning,

what these little creatures looked like, and he said,

"they look like pillsbury doughboys."

And I always thought it was such a great description,

because that was long before you were really hearing much

about the grays, and these small, humanoid creatures.

The general public didn't know a lot about it, back then.

- In the late 80s and early 90s,

the abduction phenomenon was pushed into the spotlight,

thanks to books, like "communion,"

movies, like "fire in the sky,"

and television shows, like "the x-files."

Travis walton's purported abduction

while in the forests of eastern Arizona

was in the limelight for years,

and may have helped to push pop culture even further

into embracing a subject that had been overlooked,

since the hills.

Mostly, pop culture portrayed abductions

in the ways the hills or walton

relayed their own experiences:

With strange lights coming to take victims into the air,

where they were inevitably experimented on,

in an increasingly grizzly fashion.

Despite what Hollywood was saying,

this wasn't the encounter

that all experiencers claimed to have,

and very often, the contact

seemed to defy rational explanation.

In many instances, the events were so bizarre,

they left the victim believing that it was little more

than a surrealist nightmare.

Donovan Smith believes he experienced something

that defies explanation, when he was just a kid,

and that the event points to an abduction experience.

Despite taking place decades ago,

the event still affects him deeply, today,

but has left him wondering

if, maybe, he didn't simply dream the whole thing up.

- Well, it was around '91 to '92.

It was late night. I was sleeping.

I woke up. I had to use the restroom.

We had three bedrooms, and we had three kids,

so, two of us had to share a bedroom,

so, we had bunk beds in one of the rooms.

And I happened to be sleeping on the bottom bunk,

and one night, I woke up,

and I swung my feet over the side of the bed,

and I was just sitting there.

I looked down, and there was nothing,

and I looked back up, and I went to go stand up,

and I couldn't stand up for some reason.

So, I looked back down, and when I looked down,

I saw what appeared to be, like, green mist.

Some kind of greenish mist.

Pretty solid, and it was swirling around my feet.

And so, I tried to stand up, and I couldn't,

and, you know, I figured it's probably because of the mist,

or whatever.

And I didn't know what it was,

and it looked like it was coming from underneath my bed.

When it was around my ankles,

it looked almost like shackles, almost, kinda,

'cause it was more solid in the middle,

like it was all connected as one big thing.

And then, the next thing I know, I just,

I looked up again, looked back down,

the stuff was gone, and I could stand up.

And after that, I got really nervous.

So, I went and used the restroom,

and when I came back, I was so scared

that I jumped onto my bed,

because I didn't want to get my feet

anywhere near the bottom of the bed,

because I didn't know if something, you know,

was underneath the bed, or what it might've been.

About a day or two later,

there was a kid in my neighborhood, who told me

that he saw a big black triangle-looking spaceship

in the sky.

And he said that it had lights that looked like a v-shape.

I'm not sure if it wasーwhen he saw it,

but it was around that exact time

that that stuff happened to me.

You know, it's one of those things, where it's like,

you always look back, and you're like, you know,

did it really happen? Was it real?

But, you know, it's so vivid in my memory.

I see the picture, you know,

I could see it, clear as day, every time. You know?

Every time I think about it.

- So, this is where folklorists will take a step back,

and they'll apply two different theories.

The first is called the cultural source hypothesis theory,

which is a theoretical perspective,

where people who have had experiences of the supernatural

are formulating their stories or their experiences,

solely based on a cultural understanding

of what that should look like.

Experiential source hypothesis

is almost the exact opposite of that,

where it says that people might have

a minor cultural awareness

of supernatural or paranormal phenomena,

but instead, when they're sharing their stories,

it's based on something that actually happened to them

that's unexplainable. We don't know what it is.

So, it's not necessarily saying a ufo is an alien spaceship,

but instead, what it's saying is that the ufo

is something unidentified,

it's something they don't know what it is,

and when they talk about their story of seeing that,

or being abducted, or having any type of contact with that,

their story is formulated based on their experience.

- I think we should have scientists,

and especially psychologists looking at this

to figure out, is this just mental?

Is there a physical side to it?

What's going on, here?

Even if it is just, kind of, a

emotional manifestation that happens,

you know, why is that?

Do these people need to be treated?

What's going on, here?

- Traveling the seemingly serene landscapes

of some sections of the white mountains

gives me a greater appreciation for how alone and isolated

the hills must've felt, back in 1961.

Here, you are never very close

to any real signs of civilization,

and even during the daylight hours,

you get a sense of isolation.

It's chilling to think about traveling these same roads,

late at night, almost 60 years ago,

before there were even the modest houses,

gas stations, and villages that have grown up

around the area, since.

The hills' abduction set the stage

for many experiencers to come forward

with their own encounters.

But, it also helped establish tropes

that have been reported, ever since.

From physical aftereffects,

like scars and markings on abductees,

to supposed alien implants, recovered from those taken,

the phenomenon has continued to grow only stranger

in the waning years.

This includes the theories

as to why people are being abducted to begin with.

- People who are experiencers

talk very frequently about the idea

of hybrid alien-human children,

especially male and female experiencers

will say that their biological anatomy has been utilized

for the production of a hybrid child.

- There are some that even feel that

they have beenーfor women, impregnated,

or for men, that semen samples have been taken.

And then, a step beyond that, is there's a group of people

who believe they've had children

that they believe are hybrid children

that they're shown on these spacecraft,

and things like this.

- So, when we talk about conspiracy theories,

there is one other one that we should probably touch on.

That is a conspiracy involved with alien abduction,

and the idea that

aliens

are running some kind of a breeding program,

or a hybridization program.

And it's this concept that

there's either something wrong

with the genetics of this alien race,

or they want to possibly invade our world

in a more insidious way, by creating alien-human hybrids.

- Locations where a high volume of ufo sightings come in

are frequently associated with abductions,

and nowhere is this more prevalent than the Hudson valley.

During the 1980s and '90s,

a string of triangular ufo reports

flooded in from around the area.

The Hudson valley flaps connection,

with famed abductee, whitley strieber,

is often overlooked,

but strieber was living in the pine bush area

of the valley in 1985,

when the events that went on to inform

his bestselling abductee recounting communion was written.

Strieber wasn't the only witness

having contact with the pilots of the craft

seen around the area at the time.

- When I first started my research,

I really expected that 99% of the stories would be,

"oh, I saw a distant light in the sky."

The largest chapter in my book turned out to be abductions.

More often than not, I don't have a percentage for you,

but I think the majority of these close sightings

ended up in some sort of missing time,

in some sort of contactee experience,

or just out-and-out abductions.

It was rampant, particularly in the 1980s.

- I remember,

I saw this object.

We lived by a quarry,

so, there was, on, like, a mountaintop,

at the end of my road,

and I saw a craft, there,

in the daytime, when I was a little boy.

You know, my whole childhood growing up,

I had these experiences,

and

I saw this craft over the trap rock,

andー

I told my father at one point,

and we walked up there.

He took me by the hand and walked up the road,

and he sent me back home,

'cause I couldn't climb up the mountain.

And I don't know what he was going up there for, really.

I guess he saw it, too.

You know, I went back home,

I'm not really sure if I went back home by myself,

or I waited for him to come down,

or what, but,

different things happened to me

through my life, at different periods,

and we moved from the house,

I think, when I was about 10 years old,

and we moved from where we were to another town,

and I don't remember any experiences happening

until

I got married, and I moved up here.

One night, I went to the store to get some beer.

It was a Friday night.

I kept getting this feeling to go out.

To go out to the store.

I didn't really want to go out.

It was, like, one of the coldest nights of the winter.

I remember seeing these lights,

moving through the woods, that night.

I went down this back road,

and the store is about 10 minutes away.

And as I made a right to follow this Ridge,

this craft was, kind of, appeared over the Ridge,

and it kept pace with my car.

As I drove along, and I kept looking up at it,

and it was just moving with me, over the trees.

And at one point, I came around a turn,

and it was down on the ground.

This big light.

And it looked like a big egg,

shape, you know.

But, it was house-sized,

and there was mist swirling all around it,

I distinctly remember.

And then, I remember just having this feeling

come all over my body.

It started tingling, and all my hair was, like, standing up.

And the next thing I knew,

I started my vehicle, and drove off.

And iーso, I went down to the store,

and when I got there, it was midnight.

And I'd left the house about 10 o'clock.

And anyway, I got some beer and I went home.

I didn't drink it, 'cause it was too late already,

but, yeah. I went home, and my wife was hysterical.

- Were there physical effects from any of this

that you can talk about, or...

- well, after that event,

I don't know if it was the same night,

'cause a lot of things started happening

after I had that encounter there, on the road.

But, one morning, I woke up,

and there was dried blood coming out of my nose.

It was all dried, all over my face.

Scoops in the back of my neck, here,

that you can put your finger in, actually.

Shaped in a triangle.

- Any idea what was going on with, you know,

your nose, or anything?

- No.

But, years later,

I had triplets,

and one morning, when I went in to say goodbye to them,

they all had blood coming out of their nose.

You know, they were sleeping,

but all of them had blood dried on their face,

coming out of their nose.

Why could it happen to me, as an adult, but.

- On many cases, all kinds of physical effects:

Ill feeling, the classic nosebleeds, scoop marks.

There was a whole variety of it.

I have not gotten a lot of,

"I was on a table, in aー

"in a craft-type thing."

Mostly, "I don't know what just happened

"to the last two hours.

"And then, it happened to my brother.

"And I found out that my child is now experiencing it."

So, a lot of abduction experiences,

many, many multi-generational experiences, as well.

- I remember speaking to the first abductee,

face-to-face, I ever did,

and her husband sitting next to her,

and

he was holding her hand so tight,

as she was recalling her abduction experience to me,

and she was just bawling her eyes out.

- With hers being so traumatic,

was it an ongoing situation, or just a one-time event?

- It started as a one-time event,

until

she started having reoccurring dreams

that other things had happened.

Whether or not those dreams

or those memories are real or not, I can't say,

but she

believes it was ongoing.

- What do youーdo you think there's any tie-in

with genetic backgrounds, in certainーit runs in families?

- The idea that the abduction phenomenon

has some sort of relation to lineage, or ancestry,

or even bloodlines is very fascinating.

When you do look at it,

a lot of these people who are claiming to have been abducted

do have similar blood types,

or it runs in the family.

You hear the grandpa had an experience,

the dad, the daughter.

There could be something to that.

- While I'd begun investigating this topic

from the perspective that people need to return

to the optimism that led the way

in the earliest days of research,

I can't help but see why some approach the subject

with such hesitance.

The abduction phenomenon has thrown a wrench into the works.

That makes me question if I even want

to look into a phenomenon

that can so quickly turn on innocent people.

One interesting side-note is that some purported abductees

don't have the same type of negative experience

that many of those taken claim to have.

In fact, some believe the experience

to be overwhelmingly positive.

Whatever the case might be,

an experiencer seems to undergo a traumatic event

that never fades from their memory,

and can have lingering effects

that negatively or positively impact

the rest of their lives.

- There are a lot of people that are making these claims,

and these people are not just all weirdos.

Some of these people are very credible.

Some of them are professors, law enforcement, scientists,

I mean, it runs the gamut

of people making these sort of claims.

For that reason, I think it's a very important situation

that we need to pay attention to.

- And most of the high-profile ufo cases

deal with people who have been abducted.

There's also a move towards changing

the term, abducted, into experiencer,

in order to move away from some of the stigma

that we find, when we look at abductions, generally.

Oftentimes, that stigma is presented in a way

that conflicts with a lot of beliefs

we see in today's society about appropriate behavior.

So, moving towards the term, experiencer, instead,

allows us to navigate away from some of that stigma,

and instead, look at the validity of those experiences.

- I can just tell you, there were some interesting reports.

Again, some of these were very credible people.

I can't say they were being abducted by aliens,

but something happened to them that affected their lives.

Some of them, as I recall, had some interesting

physical signs on them,

of something that had occurred.

- It was just a surreal moment for me,

'cause I had always heard of abductions,

they were always, you know, kind of,

cool and sensational,

but until I sat down with a woman

whose husband was there,

believes her, supports her,

and she is just so overcome with emotion,

and clearly, some sort of trauma,

I had no choice but to believe

something firmly happened to her.

(Bold cinematic music)

- As with Phoenix, the Chestnut Ridge, or the Hudson valley,

visiting a place like franconia

pushes the people at the heart of the subject

to the front of my mind.

Betty hill, later in life, believed that her own taking

was an innocent and benevolent one.

Betty passed away in 2004,

but her story remains as much a mystery

as it did when she was alive.

While dreams, government manipulation,

and even simple misidentification and outright lying

have been offered up by skeptics

as the cause for the hills' abduction,

we still don't know what happened in 1961.

Despite this fact, I can't help but think

something really did happen here, all those years ago.

And regardless of how she might have felt about it

in her waning years,

the event had to have been as baffling as it was terrifying.

- So, they put the sign up in 2011, to commemorate it,

but I think it's kind of interesting, just in general,

talking about abductions.

A lot of these people,

as we've found out, talking to people,

it seems like they actually have trauma:

Some sort of, almost like, PTSD,

that they, kind of, deal with,

that having a story like this

probably wouldn't do them any favors.

- That's what I was about to say.

It's not gonna do them any good, whatsoever.

I mean, it's going to make, probably,

a relatively,

I don't want to say hard life,

but it's gonna make things harder.

It's not going to make anything easier for them.

I don't know. I don't think itー

it does seem,

it does seem credible on the surface, at least.

- I mean, what about the other side of it,

to where you're trying to figure out,

maybe a more logical, terrestrial explanation

for an abduction, like Betty and Barney went through.

- In my opinion, I think a lot of them

have, perhaps, trauma, that they have dealt with,

at younger ages, or whatever the case may be,

and a way of rationalizing it.

It's perhaps saying it's extraterrestrial,

as opposed to saying it's somebody, maybe, close to you

that may have hurt you.

- I mean, what do you guys think the chances are

that it was all the government,

and it was just a big experiment to see how, maybe,

they would react,

and if they came out and talked about it,

then how the public would react to their story.

- It's... - Or just imaginative people.

- Or imaginative people.

I mean, it really could be. It really could be.

- Yeah, I think that's the thing about all of this,

is that there is an infinite amount of possibility, here.

I mean, you can literally throw something up,

and it could potentially be correct.

It could be the government working with aliens,

the aliens working with the government,

no aliens, no government,

or any combination of all of those.

- There's probably people who have

a lot more information about this than we do,

and that's what kind of is, I think,

frustrates a lot of people,

and I think, in some ways,

that may happen to Betty hill, as well.

Obviously, I didn't know her,

but people who did claim that, you know,

she was very straight-edge,

and all about, kind of, the experience,

and trying to find out what was happening.

So, maybe that's the case, as well.

I don't know, but, like I said,

we're just, sort of, taking shots in the dark, here. So.

- When every thread is so long.

(Dramatic cinematic music)

Coming up on the final episode of on the trail of ufos.

(Dramatic cinematic music)