Missing Time

On the night of September 19–20, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were returning from a vacation in Canada along Route 3 through New Hampshire's White Mountains. They noticed a light that appeared to follow their car and eventually stopped as it descended over the road ahead. The two arrived home in Portsmouth significantly later than the journey warranted — roughly two hours that could not be accounted for by their consciously remembered route.

Both Hill began experiencing disturbing dreams within days. Betty dreamed of being taken aboard a craft, separated from Barney, and subjected to a medical examination by small beings. Barney developed anxiety and ulcers and began seeing a psychiatrist for stress. When their therapist referred them to Dr. Benjamin Simon — a respected Boston psychiatrist experienced in hypnosis — neither was specifically seeking a UFO explanation for their distress.

Under separate hypnotic regression sessions that Simon conducted with each of them independently, Betty and Barney described the same event in remarkable detail. Both recalled a beam of light, paralysis, transport into a craft, and medical examinations performed by beings with large, wrap-around eyes. The descriptions were consistent with each other down to specific details of the craft's interior, without either having been in the same room during the other's session.

Betty drew a three-dimensional star map under hypnosis that she said was shown to her by the beings as a representation of their home system. In 1969, schoolteacher and amateur astronomer Marjorie Fish spent years constructing a scale model of the nearest stars and found a match for Betty's configuration in the Zeta Reticuli system. The match was published in Astronomy magazine and remains contested but unrefuted.

On the evening of October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were fishing on the west bank of the Pascagoula River when a glowing craft descended nearby and three beings emerged, levitating both men into the object. The experience lasted approximately 20 minutes by Hickson's estimate, but when they returned to the pier, 45 minutes had passed since they had begun noticing the object.

Neither man had any memory of the full duration of the encounter — their conscious recollection ended with being levitated and began again back on the pier. This dissociation of conscious experience from elapsed time is the core feature of missing time events: the witnesses were not asleep, not unconscious in any conventional sense, but have no accessible memory of what occurred during the gap.

Hickson's description under hypnosis and during the police interview was internally consistent across many tellings over the following decades. He could account for only the brief period of levitation and examination before memory blanked. Parker, traumatised severely by the encounter, initially provided only fragments and took years to speak publicly about the experience.

The hidden recording made by Sheriff Diamond — capturing the two men alone in the interview room when they believed no one was listening — remains one of the most significant pieces of secondary evidence in any missing time case. Rather than relaxing or comparing notes on a story, both men were in genuine distress, with Parker praying aloud. Diamond later stated that in his experience, guilty parties relax when they believe themselves unobserved. Hickson and Parker did not.

In 2004, a British man driving alone on the M6 motorway in the English Midlands reported a missing time episode that was investigated by the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP). The man reported noticing an unusual light above the road before losing all memory. He became aware of himself driving normally again, but several junctions further along the motorway than his last memory suggested — representing approximately 40 minutes of travel for which he had no recollection.

He was in no way impaired, had not been drowsy, and described the onset as abrupt rather than gradual, which distinguished it from microsleep or highway hypnosis events. His account was collected by ASSAP investigators within 48 hours of the incident. There were no other witnesses. The man reported no associated UAP encounter before or after, no unusual marks, and no physical symptoms — making the case a "pure" missing time event without the additional features that characterise abduction-associated gaps.

ASSAP filed the case in its anomalous experience database. It is cited by researchers as an example of missing time that cannot be attributed to known neurological events (which are typically preceded by prodromal symptoms) or to deliberate fabrication (where additional detail and a more dramatic narrative would typically be invented). The sparse, verifiable simplicity of the account is considered by some investigators its most significant feature.