On the evening of September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire from a short vacation in Niagara Falls and Montreal. Shortly after passing Lancaster on U.S. Route 3 in the White Mountains, Betty noticed a bright point of light that appeared to be moving erratically near the moon. As the couple continued south, the light grew larger and followed them, eventually descending to an altitude of only a few hundred feet above their car.
Near Indian Head, Barney stopped the car and stepped out with binoculars. He later described seeing a disc-shaped craft with a row of windows, behind which he could see humanoid figures looking down at him. In terror, he rushed back to the car and sped south, hearing an electronic buzzing sound. The Hills arrived home roughly two hours later than their estimated travel time would have predicted, unable to account for the missing interval. In the weeks that followed, Betty suffered recurring nightmares of being taken aboard the craft and examined, and Barney developed severe anxiety, ulcers, and a ring of warts around his groin.
Beginning in January 1964, psychiatrist Benjamin Simon of Boston used hypnotic regression on both Hills over the course of several months. Under hypnosis, they independently described being stopped on the highway, led aboard the craft by short gray-skinned beings with large slanted eyes, and subjected to medical examinations, including the insertion of a long needle into Betty's abdomen — a procedure that foreshadowed amniocentesis, which was not widely known in 1961. Betty also recalled being shown a three-dimensional 'star map' of the beings' travel routes, which amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish later argued resembled the Zeta Reticuli binary star system.
The Hill case was the first American alien-abduction narrative to receive mainstream attention. It established the now-canonical elements of such accounts — missing time, gray humanoids, medical examinations, and hypnotic recovery of suppressed memories — and remains the archetype against which all subsequent abduction reports are measured.