After our many emails, it was great to meet Txxx in person! He had recently returned from a very fruitful research trip to the Betty Hill archives in New Hampshire, and we had a lot to talk about. At one point in the conversation, Txxx mentioned an odd little story that I had forgotten... In all the hoopla round the Hill's abduction case when it became public knowledge in 1964, some skeptics tried very hard to prove that the Hills had just imagined their experience, and one skeptic, I can't remember who, suggested that the Hills got the whole idea from an episode of "The Outer Limits" TV series that had just aired the week before.
Now, I'm no stranger to "The Outer Limits." It was a very eerie, atmospheric science fiction anthology series that ran on ABC TV from 1963 to 1965, and it scared the living crap out of adorable little 3 year-old me. Nightmares. Bed-wetting. Piercing screams in the dead of night. You name it. This show had some scary-ass monsters...
The episode in question was called "The Bellero Shield," and it featured a glowing humanoid creature made of light that was trapped on earth. It's a particularly creepy episode, and the luminous alien is pretty memorable. Here it is, in all its glory...
"
Yes, this thing gave me nightmares when I was three.
So this skeptic notices that this show aired on TV just the week before Betty and Barney Hill underwent their first session of time-regression hypnosis and remembered the aliens who abducted them, and back then you only had three channels, so odds are pretty high that the Hills had this tuned in the previous Saturday, so it fits, right? The Hills obviously remembered the "Outer Limits" alien and imagined that they had encountered a whole spaceship full of similar beasties out on that lonely detour back in 1961.
Txxx and I had a good laugh going over the story, and Txxx told me that when Betty had been confronted with the accusation that she and Barney had simply recreated an alien from "The Outer Limits," she said, "I don't even know what the hell that is!" You go, Betty! Then I mentioned that that particular "Outer Limits" episode was actually a science fiction retelling of Shakespeare's "Macbeth," and Txxx got really excited about seeing it. What do you expect from an English professor?
But I've been thinking about the strange case of the duplicate alien for the past few days, and something just isn't right. I decided to look up the ABC TV Saturday night lineup for 1964 and discovered that immediately after not remembering watching "The Outer Limits" at 7:30 the Hills would have not remembered watching "The Lawrence Welk Show" at 8:30... so, "if "their TV set "had "been turned on and "if "the TV show connection "is "valid, the Hills actually would have gone under hypnosis and remembered being abducted by a spaceship full of this:
Lawrence Welk, alien
Actually, this would explain a lot...
Source: space-wanderers.blogspot.com
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