Janet also described the incident to a former local police chief, who suggested the Hills notify Pease AFB in Portsmouth. Betty was afraid she had been exposed to radioactivity, and called. She gave only the bare details to the officer on the phone (not mentioning, for example, the double row of windows or the shiny spots on the car). Barney also spoke to the officer, who informed him the call was being monitored. Whereas Betty had felt the officer was “cynical and uncommunicative,” Barney thought he was “intensely interested.” The base called back the next day for more details, but received little more from the Hills. That appears to be the sum total of the Blue Book investigation into the Hill case. Two years later, on September 27, 1963, its final report cited “insufficient evidence” to make a determination, although the author of the report stated the object “was in all probability Jupiter,” and that “no evidence was presented to indicate that the object was due to other than natural causes.”
For now, however, intrigued by their encounter, the Hills decided to draw the object from memory while in separate rooms; the drawings were remarkably similar. Betty decided to learn more about UFOs and found Keyhoe’s The
On October 4 and 5, 1961, two more individuals, C. D. Jackson and Robert Hohman, entered the story. Jackson (presumably not the C. D. Jackson with extensive intelligence and journalistic connections) was a “senior engineer” for a company that no one would specify, but which was “one of the world’s most notable corporations in the electronic industry.” Hohman worked for the same company as a staff scientific writer on engineering and science. The two were in Washington for the Twelfth International Astronautical Congress, as part of their “regular routine.” They were “deeply involved” in work on the space program and were in the process of preparing a paper on Nikola Tesla, David Todd, and Marconi to suggest that these men were monitoring interplanetary communications between 1899 and 1924—possibly from Tau Ceti. Incredible as this sounds, both Keyhoe and journalist John Fuller attested to it. (Jackson and Hohman are odd and shadowy figures in this episode, but recall William Lear’s earlier comments regarding secret research in the aerospace industry on antigravity propulsion methods—clearly related to UFOs.) Jackson and Hohman were also members of NICAP and arranged for lunch with Keyhoe to gain relevant UFO data for their research. When Hohman said that UFO reports seemed to be dropping in frequency, Keyhoe showed them Betty Hill’s letter, which he had just received. The two were impressed.
On October 19, NICAP secretary Richard Hall wrote to Walter Webb, a lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium in Boston and NICAP scientific advisor. Would Webb investigate the Hill case? Initially reluctant, he met with the Hills on October 21, confident he would find holes in their story. Instead, he interviewed them for eight hours. In his words, he was
so amazed, so impressed by both the Hills and their account that we skipped lunch and went right through the afternoon and early evening. During that time, I cross-examined them together, separately, together, requestioned them again and again. I tried to make them slip up somewhere, and I couldn’t. Theirs was an ironclad story. They seemed to me to be a sincere, honest couple driving home from vacation late at night on a lonely road, when suddenly something completely unknown and undefinable descended on them. Something entirely foreign or alien to their existence.
If anything, Webb felt the Hills underplayed the dramatic aspects of their encounter. The three were so caught up in the account that the Hills forgot to show Webb the spots on the car, although they mentioned them. Barney, meanwhile, was still running up against a “curtain,” beyond which he could go no further. Webb’s report to NICAP on October 26 gave great detail on the interview and concluded that the two were telling the truth. As far as Webb was concerned, the incident occurred just as they claimed.
