SUBJECT: THE HILL ABDUCTION CASE FILE: UFO2713 PART 12 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ZETA RETICULI INCIDENT By Terence Dickinson with related commentary by: Jeffrey L. Kretsch, Carl Sagan, Steven Soter, Robert Schaeffer, Marjorie Fish, David Saunders, and Michael Peck. (C) 1976 by AstroMedia, Corp., publisher of Astronomy Magazine. [...] the experience [Hill abduction] remains a fascinating story despite the absence of proof that it actually happened. Anyway -- that's where things were in 1966 when Marjorie Fish, an Ohio schoolteacher, amateur astronomer and member of Mensa, became involved. She wondered if the objects shown on the map that Betty Hill allegedly observed inside the vehicle might represent some actual pattern of celestial objects. To get more information about the map she decided to visit Betty Hill in the summer of 1969. (Barney Hill died in early 1969.) Here is Ms. Fish's account of that meeting: "On Aug.4, 1969, Betty Hill discussed the star map with me. Betty explained that she drew the map in 1964 under posthypnotic suggestion. It was to be drawn only if she could remember it accurately, and she was not to pay attention to what she was drawing -- which puts it in the realm of automatic drawing. This is a way of getting at repressed or forgotten material and can result in unusual accuracy. She made two erasures showing her conscious mind took control part of the time. "Betty described the map as three-dimensional, like looking through a window. The stars were tinted and glowed. The map material was flat and thin (not a model), and there were no noticeable lenticular lines like one of our three-dimensional processes. (It sounds very much like a reflective hologram.) Betty did not shift her position while viewing it, so we cannot tell if it would give the same three-dimensional view from all positions or if it would be completely three-dimensional. Betty estimated the map was approximately three feet wide and two feet high with the pattern covering most of the map. She was standing about three feet away from it. She said there were many other stars on the map but she only (apparently) was able to specifically recall the prominent ones connected by lines and a small distinctive triangle off to the left. There was no concentration of stars to indicate the Milky Way (galactic plane) suggesting that if it represented reality, it probably only contained local stars. There were no grid lines." [...] Now we are ready to return to the map drawn by Betty Hill. Marjorie Fish reasoned that if the stars in the Hill map corresponded to a patter of real stars -- perhaps something like we just developed, only from an alien's viewpoint -- it might be possible to pinpoint the origin of the alleged space travelers. Assuming the two stars in the foreground of the Hill map were the "base" stars (the sun, a single star, was ruled out here), she decided to try to locate the entire pattern. She theorized that the Hill map contained only local stars since no concentration would be present if a more distant viewpoint was assumed and if both "us" and the alien visitors' home base were to be represented. Let's assume, just as an astronomical exercise, that the map does show the sun and the star that is "the sun" to the humanoids. We'll take the Hill encounter at face value, and see where it leads. Since the aliens were described as "humanoid" and seemed reasonably comfortable on this planet, their home planet should be basically like ours. Their atmosphere must be similar because the Hills breathed without trouble while inside the ship, and the aliens did not appear to wear any protective apparatus. And since we assume their biology is similar to ours, their planet should have the same temperature regime as Earth (Betty and Barney did say it was uncomfortably cold in the ship). In essence, then, we assume their home planet must be very Earthlike. Based on what we discussed earlier it follows that their sun would be on our list if it were within 55 light-years of us. The lines on the map, according to Betty Hill, were described by the alien as "trade routes" or "places visited occasionally" with the dotted lines as "expeditions". Any interpretation of the Betty Hill map must retain the logic of these routes (i.e. the lines would link stars that would be worth visiting). Keeping all this in mind, Marjorie Fish constructed several three- dimensional models of the solar neighborhood in hopes of detecting the pattern in the Hill map. Using beads dangling on threads, she painstakingly recreated our stellar environment. Between Aug. 1968 and Feb. 1973, she strung beads, checked data, searched and checked again. A suspicious alignment, detected in late 1968, turned out to be almost a perfect match once new data from the detailed 1969 edition of the Catalog of Nearby Stars became available. (This catalog is often called the "Gliese catalog" -- pronounced "glee-see" -- after its principal author, Wilhelm Gliese.) The 16 stars in the stellar configuration discovered by Marjorie Fish are compared with the map drawn by Betty Hill in the diagram on page 6. If some of the star names on the Fish map sound familiar, they should. Ten of the 16 stars are from the compact group that we selected earlier based on the most logical direction to pursue to conduct interstellar exploration from Earth. Continuing to take the Hill map at face value, the radiating pattern of "trade routes" implies that Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli are the "hub" of exploration or, in the context of the incident, the aliens' home base. The sun is at the end of one of the supposedly regular trade routes. The pair of stars that make up Zeta Reticuli is practically in the midst of the cluster of solar type stars that attracted us while we were mapping out a logical interstellar voyage. Checking further we find that all but two of the stars in the Fish pattern are on the table of nearby solar type stars. These two stars are Tau 1 Eridani (an F6 star) and Gliese 86.1 (K2), and are, respectively, just above and below the parameters we arrived at earlier. One star that should be there (Zeta Tucanae) is missing probably because it is behind Zeta 1 Reticuli at the required viewing angle. To summarize, then: (1) the pattern discovered by Marjorie Fish has an uncanny resemblance to the map drawn by Betty Hill; (2) the stars are mostly the ones that we would visit if we were exploring from Zeta Reticuli, and (3) the travel patterns generally make sense. Walter Mitchell, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University in Columbus, has looked at Marjorie Fish's interpretation of the Betty Hill map in detail and tells us, "The more I examine it, the more I am impressed by the astronomy involved in Marjorie Fish's work." During their examination of the map, Mitchell and some of his students inserted the positions of hundreds of nearby stars into a computer and had various space vistas brought up on a cathode ray tube readout. They requested the computer to put them in a position out beyond Zeta Reticuli looking toward the sun. From this viewpoint the map pattern obtained by Marjorie Fish was duplicated with virtually no variations. Mitchell noted an important and previously unknown fact first pointed out by Ms. Fish: The stars in the map are almost in a plane; that is, they fill a wheel shaped volume of space that makes star hopping from one to another easy and the logical way to go -- and that is what is implied by the map that Betty Hill allegedly saw. "I can find no major point of quibble with Marjorie Fish's interpretation of the Betty Hill map," says David R. Saunders, a statistics expert at the Industrial Relations Center of the University of Chicago. By various lines of statistical reasoning he concludes that the chances of finding a match among 16 stars of a specific spectral type among the thousand-odd stars nearest the sun is "at least 1,000 to 1 against". "The odds are about 10,000 to 1 against a random configuration matching perfectly with Betty Hill's map," Saunders reports. "But the star group identified by Marjorie Fish isn't quite a perfect match, and the odds consequently reduce to about 1,000 to 1. That is, there is one chance in 1,000 that the observed degree of congruence would occur in the volume of space we are discussing. "In most fields of investigation where similar statistical methods are used, that degree of congruence is rather persuasive," concludes Saunders. Saunders, who has developed a monumental computerized catalog of more than 60,000 UFO sightings, tells us that the Hill case is not unique in its general characteristics -- there are other known cases of alleged communication with extraterrestrials. But in no other case on record have maps ever been mentioned. ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************