He quickly assured Betty that it must be a passenger jet taking off for Canada. Out of the pair, Barney is said to be the more scientific-minded and level-headed so he wasn’t even entertaining the idea that this light couldn’t be easily explained. So she asked Barney to pull over and the two of them broke out the binoculars to get a better look. At first her gut instinct said: it's a shooting star, of course! But when out of nowhere the light stopped abruptly before continuing to move again in an entirely different direction she knew something weird was going on. Through the night they drove, winding through the dark, steep mountain roads until finally as they neared Lincoln, NH, Betty caught her first glimpse of a bright light soaring across the sky.
Betty and barney hill illustrations full#
So even after a full day of travel, the couple decided it was best to play it safe and make the 5 hour drive home before the weather took a turn for the worse. In the evening of Tuesday, September 19th Betty and Barney heard that Tropical Storm Esther (which would later develop into a hurricane) was whirling up the coast, heading straight for New Hampshire. So they decided to pool their funds of less than $70 (which is equal to about $650 today) and decided if they were frugal, they could still make the trip work – no problem.Īnd by all accounts everything about this trip went great, their travels brought them through New York, Niagara Falls, Toronto and then Montreal, but that’s where things went a bit off course. Betty actually already had a pre-scheduled weeklong vacation from her job as a child welfare worker, so Barney thought he might surprise her with a little road trip to Niagara Falls and Montreal.īut since the trip was so last-minute, the banks were closed by the time he returned from his night-shift on Saturday morning. So it was the end of a long work week, a few months after Barney had settled into his new life in New Hampshire, when last-minute, he decided to ask his boss for a few days off. All things considered though, it’s still reported that this summer was some of the happiest times of Betty and Barney’s lives. However, his role in Boston was very different from what he was used to. He was now sorting mail on the graveyard shift with a 2-hour commute both ways in the notorious Boston traffic. It wasn’t until Barney was able to transfer to Boston, MA that he finally joined Betty in New Hampshire just a few months before that fateful September night. Meanwhile, Barney continued his job as a city carrier for the Postal Service in Philadelphia, a position he had held for nearly 2 decades. However, some of those big changes were delayed even after they were married as they still continued their long-distance relationship while Betty worked as a social worker for the state of New Hampshire, a role she had recently landed after earning her bachelor's degree at the local University. But despite those grim facts, Betty and Barney were excited to start this new chapter of their life together and begin to make some big changes for their future.
In fact it was still illegal in 31 states and only 4% of all Americans approved of marriage between black and white people.
It's important to note that this was a time when interracial marriage was not widely accepted in the US. The couple pursued a long-distance relationship for 3 years until marrying in 1960.
It was 1957, just a few years before that fateful night, when Barney, a black, 39-year-old Virginia born “city kid” now living in Philadelphia was falling for a woman he met while on vacation – Betty, a 42-year-old, small-town girl from rural New Hampshire.
While the legendary story of the Betty and Barney Hill UFO mystery technically began on September 19th, 1961, it's important to roll back the clocks a bit to better understand who Betty and Barney really were (and of course, to decide what really happened here).
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