Betty Hill's last hurrah: a secret UFO symposium in New Hampshire

One of the most curious events to come out of the Great Internet Stock Bubble was the so-called Encounters at Indian Head project, the very existence of which has been kept unknown to the public until just now. The symposium was prepared under a shroud of secrecy that was amazingly effective, given the decadeslong inability of most top UFOlogists to behave responsibly about anything. Organized by the late Karl Pflock (see his obituary in SI November/December 2006), author of Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (Prometheus, 2000) and the British Fortean author Peter Brookesmith, the event was funded by Joe Firmage, the Silicon Valley then-multimillionaire who seems determined do whatever it takes to bring the public into an even higher state of extraterrestrial awareness.

In September of 2000, I traveled from California to New Hampshire to participate in the secret "stealth" UFO symposium. The subject was the alleged 1961 UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill, the first such incident reported in the United States, made famous by John Fuller's 1966 book, The Interrupted Journey, then even more so by the 1975 NBC-TV movie, The UFO Incident. Firmage was covering all our expenses and even paid us for the rights to the papers we were writing, which would be published together as a book. The purpose of the symposium was, simply, to find out what really happened to Betty and Barney Hill. The plan was that nobody would find out about even the existence of the symposium until the book containing its published proceedings appeared "out of the blue," presumably creating a sensation. The symposium came off exactly as planned, a tribute to the skills of Karl Pflock.

The event was held at the Indian Head Resort, just a stone's throw from the spot where Betty and Barney Hill allegedly saw the UFO cross the road and hover in front of their car. The setting and accommodations were unarguably splendid; the company, surprisingly congenial. UFOlogists, even those who are in general agreement with each other, have a reputation for feuding like Hatfields and McCoys. The high level of the discussion was probably due to the organizers' careful decision to exclude those UFOlogists who have a reputation for insufferable behavior, whatever their knowledge of the subject. Bravo, Karl. The pre-symposium secrecy ensured that we would not be troubled by the press, the curious, or by certain UFOlogists known for being pushy and obnoxious. However, the insistence in the nondisclosure agreement for post-event secrecy was more difficult to understand. In January 2001, Pflock announced the "suspension" of the Indian Head project to its participants. The ongoing Internet stock collapse undoubtedly cut into Firmage's discretionary spending, with the once high flying company he founded, U.S. Web, now bankrupt and liquidated. Still, Firmage paid every cent promised to the participants. With Karl Pflock's death, I presumed that the project would be defunct and that the nondisdosure requirement might last indefinitely. But Karl's widow, Mary Martinek, completed the editing, and the result is the volume, Encounters at Indian Head, published by Anomalist Books (see http://tinyurl.com/2ddmu2).

The Grande Dame of UFOlogy, the late Betty Hill herself, was present to guide us through a reenactment of the entire "abduction" scenario, assisted by her niece Kathy Marden, who knew the story almost as well as Betty did. I'd met Betty several times before. She regaled us with stories about her literally hundreds of UFO sightings that occurred after her initial UFO "abduction." She claimed that she organized an entire "Invisible College" of scientists from top laboratories who went out with her to observe and study these UFOs, gathered reams of documentation and data on them, then apparently destroyed it all, as it was their intention to merely study the UFOs and not publish anything about them.

Several of the more naive participants spoke of how listening to Mrs. Hill had made it more difficult for them to accept the reality of her accounts, as if Mrs. Hill's wild stories had not been well-known in UFOlogy for at least twenty-five years. It was the way she told of greeting the extraterrestrials with a jovial "Hi, guys!" that stuck in the throat of several of the participants. Not a single participant in the symposium was willing to describe the Betty Hill we heard firsthand as a credible witness; nonetheless, a number of them still were inclined to accept her story of alien abduction, including Pflock. The organizers had wisely chosen to send Betty Hill away before we began the actual discussions, as they realized it would be impossible for us to objectively discuss the mental state of a kindly but delusional old lady who was sitting in our midst.

Most of the symposium participants were well known in the UFO and Fortean worlds. Co-organizer Peter Brookesmith, of Fortean Times magazine, showed himself to be a no-nonsense fellow who also took the partying aspect of the conference very seriously. The good times quaffing with Peter, Karl, and Karl's wife, were memorable. Another Brit in attendance was Hilary Evans, whose writings sometimes seemed a bit woozy, but who, in person, seemed sensible enough. Two participants were present only virtually. Walter N. Webb, who began a firsthand investigation of the Hill case a month after it occurred in 1961, and Martin Kottmeyer, who writes amazingly perceptive papers without ever leaving his farm in central Illinois, participated from a distance via telephone and fax.