ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1961, an American couple, called Barney and Betty Hill, was driving home towards their house in New Hampshire late in the evening. The Hills’ alien abduction claims were widely publicised during the next few years, and their story attracted great interest throughout America. The movies and TV shows created a far wider awareness of the nature of alien encounter claims, and they established a standard alien abduction format which provided the inspiration for a host of subsequent claims. In 1975, a forestry worker in Arizona called Travis Walton claimed to have been abducted by aliens whose appearance and activities bore a close resemblance to those reported by the Hills. Various different theories have been proposed in an effort to explain why aliens would want to cross the vastness of the universe in order to abduct randomly chosen people who were just minding their own business.
