What Is Missing Time in UFO Cases?

Term: Missing time: a period during a UFO encounter that a witness cannot remember, often discovered when a clock or a distance does not add up.

Term: Hypnotic regression: the use of hypnosis to try to recover memories. Research shows it can also produce false or mixed memories.

Term: Fairy-struck: a folk expression for a person who was believed to have been taken by fairies and returned confused.

What Is Missing Time in UFO Cases?

Missing time is a stretch of minutes or hours that a UFO witness cannot remember. The best-known case is Betty and Barney Hill’s drive through New Hampshire on September 19, 1961, when they lost about two hours and 35 miles. Skeptics point to dreams, stress, and the unreliability of hypnotic memory. Supporters say the gap and the couple’s distress have never been fully explained. A second well-documented case, Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson in Minnesota in 1979, involved no hypnosis at all.

The Hill case

Betty and Barney Hill were driving home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from a trip to Canada. They said a bright light seemed to follow their car. They stopped several times to look at it. Barney thought he saw figures in windows on a craft, and they drove away in fear.

They noticed odd sounds and then found themselves about 35 miles farther down the road, with roughly two hours they could not account for. When they got home, their watches had stopped, Betty’s dress was torn, and Barney’s shoes were scuffed. Both had anxiety, and Betty had nightmares.

The hypnosis sessions

In 1963 and 1964 the couple saw Boston psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon, an expert in hypnosis. Under hypnosis they described being taken aboard a craft and examined by beings with large eyes. Betty later drew a star map she said the beings showed her.

What the psychiatrist concluded

Dr. Simon did not believe the Hills were lying. He concluded that Betty’s dreams had shaped the account, and that Barney’s memories had been influenced by hers. He noted that many of the most vivid details matched dreams Betty had written down after the event.

Other explanations

The Air Force’s Project Blue Book attributed the light to natural causes and hinted that the couple had seen the planet Jupiter. Researcher Martin Kottmeyer noted that an episode of the television series The Outer Limits, aired twelve days before Barney’s first hypnosis session, featured an alien with large, wraparound eyes, which resembles Barney’s later description. Research also shows that hypnosis can create false memories.

A case without hypnosis: Val Johnson, 1979

At about 1:40 a.m. on August 27, 1979, Marshall County Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson was on patrol near Stephen, Minnesota, when he saw a bright light above the road. He said it moved toward his car and filled it with light, and he heard glass break. His next memory was 39 minutes later. Deputies who answered his call found the squad car sideways on the road with a shattered windshield, a dented hood, a broken headlight, and bent antennas. Both his wristwatch and the car’s clock were 14 minutes behind. A doctor treated his eyes, which were injured as if by welder’s burns.

The Marshall County Sheriff’s Office investigated, and J. Allen Hynek’s team concluded it was not a hoax. Skeptic Philip Klass questioned the case. What makes it useful here is what it does not depend on. No hypnosis was involved. The evidence is the damaged car, the clocks, the eye injury, and Johnson’s own radio call.

Older parallels

Folklore also describes people missing for hours, days, or years. In Celtic tradition, a person taken by fairies could return confused and changed, and was called fairy-struck. Researcher Jacques Vallée compared such stories to modern abduction reports. The comparison shows a similar pattern of story. It does not show that the cause was the same.

What is solid and what is not

The Hills’ distress and their loss of about two hours are documented, and so is Val Johnson’s gap with the damage to his car. What happened during the Hills’ hours is not, since the main evidence for it came from hypnosis. Missing time is one of the nine effects I discuss in my book Disclosure: They Are Not Extraterrestrials. Disclosure is available on Amazon. You can find more of my work at ckqbooks.com.

Sources

History.com, How Betty and Barney Hill’s Alien Abduction Story Defined the Genre (2025). Boston Public Library, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. Martin Kottmeyer, Entirely Unpredisposed (1990), as summarized by Wikipedia, The Bellero Shield. Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia (1969). MNopedia, Val Johnson Incident, 1979 (Minnesota Historical Society). Wikipedia, Val Johnson incident.