The abduction is a second layer. A week or two after the drive, Betty dreamed for about six nights of men in the road, an orange object in the woods, and an examination in separate rooms. She wrote that out in five pages in November 1961. In that dream account the figures were about five feet tall, gray-skinned, in dark uniforms. A spokesman talked to her in English. Samples were taken from her skin, ear, hair, and nails. A long needle was put in her navel and called a pregnancy test. She was shown a book of symbols and a map of dots and lines, then the book was taken back. Barney did not tell this story in 1961. He had a blank between the figure in the window and his run back to the car.

In 1964, after Barney’s ulcer, blood pressure, and anxiety had not cleared, Dr. Benjamin Simon of Boston hypnotized them separately, about once a week for seven months. The sessions come to about eleven hours of tape. Under hypnosis Barney filled the blank: large slanted eyes, a voice telling him to keep looking, a ladder or ramp coming down, the binocular strap breaking as he pulled away. He also described being led from the car with his eyes shut. Betty’s hypnotic account followed her 1961 dream pages. Simon told Webb he thought some craft had been seen, and he preferred an aircraft, conventional or classified, to a spacecraft. He was undecided about the figures in the windows. On the abduction he was not undecided. He said it happened in Betty’s dreams, that she had told them until Barney, who was highly suggestible, came to treat them as memory, and that hypnosis will play back a belief whether or not the event occurred. Years later he said it in one line: the abduction did not happen; from the sighting onward, it was largely a dream. The Hills did not accept that.

Two dates sit next to the eyes. Barney first described and drew the wraparound eyes in the session of 22 February 1964. Twelve days earlier, on 10 February, The Outer Limits had aired “The Bellero Shield,” whose alien has large wraparound eyes and a line about eyes that speak. Martin Kottmeyer pointed out the match in 1990. There is no record that Barney saw the episode. There is also no wraparound-eye description in the 1961 interview. In that interview the figures wear caps and black uniforms, and Barney said he was not close enough to make out faces, except that one seemed to grin and the one at the window frightened him.

The star map is later still. Betty’s sketch was published in John G. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey in 1966. Marjorie Fish, a schoolteacher in Ohio, built a bead-and-thread model from the Gliese star catalog and in the early 1970s said the pattern matched a view from Zeta Reticuli. Astronomy ran that claim in December 1974 and then ran the argument against it. Carl Sagan and Steven Soter said the dots were a chance alignment. Later distance measurements moved some of the stars Fish had used, and the published match did not hold.

The couple had not gone looking for a headline. A Boston Traveler story on 25 October 1965, “UFO Chiller: Did THEY Seize Couple?”, put it on the wire. Fuller interviewed them and Simon for the 1966 book. Barney died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 25 February 1969, at 46. Betty kept speaking on the subject until her death on 17 October 2004. By the late 1970s she was reporting lights on a regular basis. Robert Sheaffer, who watched her show slides at a 1980 conference, wrote that the audience, which had started out sympathetic, jeered her off the stage. Those later sightings are not the 1961 drive. New Hampshire put a marker at the Indian Head approach in July 2011.