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Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, May 2015


When Betty Hill introduced me to an Air Force Sergeant in trouble with her supervisor for describing UFOs

by: Brent Raynes



It was Saturday, February 12, 1977. The famed alien abductee Betty Hill had invited me to her home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to meet a friend of hers from the nearby Pease Air Force Base. Her friend Nadine, then a 23-year-old sergeant in the U.S. Air Force (she had enlisted when she was 19), had claimed UFO experiences going back to her childhood. One day she confided to her supervisor that she had been visiting Betty Hill and had been hypnotized by California abduction researcher Dr. Jim Harder (who periodically visited Betty). “He went into a sheer panic, was going to have me committed and all of this stuff,” Nadine told me. “It was really weird. I went down to talk to the shrink. I told him the very same story. He just shook his head. He said, ‘I can’t prove or disprove it but it doesn’t constitute that you’re nuts.’”

I asked the young sergeant if there remained any lingering concerns or problems over this issue. “Oh no,” she replied. “It’s in the past. As a matter of fact, at the command post where you have to have a top secret clearance, which I do have, they never took my clearance or anything like that. The job was a security job but a low security and since then I’ve been requested to work in high security areas, top secret with special clearances, higher up than that. I’d say, ‘What about the thing that happened?’ They’d say, ‘Oh, that crap. Don’t worry about it.’”

Nadine recalled early childhood UFO sightings. In one she may have been around 7 years of age. She was visiting her grandmother’s house in Edgecomb, Maine, on a bright, sunny day, when she and her mother saw a number of UFOs. “My mom and I just happened to look up there and the whole skyline was just covered with little disks,” she recalled. “There were so many of them that they were just overlapping each other. It was real freaky.” Then around age 12, at a gas station in Union, Maine, she and her mother saw a UFO again. “It was big,” she stated. “Just a big long one with windows all the way across it.”

“I’ve seen quite a few UFOs,” she simply remarked at one point. Shortly afterwards Betty commented, “Nadine and I have seen UFOs together. Same spot, the landing area [which is a location near Kingston, NH., that Betty Hill used to skywatch frequently and watch for UFOs].

Back in her childhood (around ages 12-14), Nadine had “really terrifying nightmares” about UFOs, about them “shining lights in my eyes,” or dreams of “a long table and white curtains, like an examining room…In another place it was sort of like body molds…I didn’t really understand but I came away from that dream with the feeling that they were trying to tell me that these moldings were used to change something.”

I asked Nadine about her dreams that dealt with the beings. “In the dream I always remember their hands as being really long fingered,” she recalled. “They had like three really long ones and then another one like where our thumb is. But they were really long and smooth and white. They were so white, smooth with no creases like we have.”

“They were always about my size, I guess,” Nadine added, concerning the beings. “You have to understand that I was younger then too. I was about 14 or 15, so I might have been about 5 foot 2 inches then. …Usually they had very non-descript, slightly form fitting suits.” Those she remembered seemed to be a silver or white, though sometimes another color, usually blue. She touched the arm of one of them and recalled it was “all smooth with no hair, all white and not a single blemish.” Their skin also made her think of unbaked bread or raw white mushrooms.

Growing up, Nadine had quite a few strange, spooky memories of unexplained or odd things that transpired. She and her mother both seemed to have some psychic ability also. “She knew when my grandfather was going to die,” Nadine remarked of her mother. “She woke my father up in the middle of the night and she said, ‘We have to get dressed. I’ve got to go to my father.’ He said, ‘What the hell for?’ She called and they had just put him in the hospital and he died shortly after.” Nadine recalled her own premonition that her grandmother was going to die and a few days later she passed on too.

For awhile, her family lived at a place called South Hope, and on a nearby mountain they’d see strange lights. “There’s nothing there,” she stated. “Just sheer cliffs and such. No reason for the lights up there.” Every few days, her mother for some reason would walk up to the top of that mountain, just herself and the family dog. “My father used to get mad at her for it,” she said. “He’d come home and she hadn’t done any work or anything, and he’d say, ‘Where in the hell have you been?’”

The family had also been plagued by unexplained electronic beeping sounds and at other times the television set, no matter where they lived, would go off by itself. “My brother would tell me that we had to go outdoors,” Nadine recalled. “He’d say, ‘We have to get out of here now’ and I’d ask him what the hell he was talking about and he thought that the TV was being used as a screen to look out at us.”

At the family home in Edgecomb, Maine, a lot of anomalous things apparently happened. “I had left to go pick up my brother who was out of town,” Nadine recalled. Before leaving she spoke briefly with her boyfriend, named Steven. “He’s usually somebody who gets up early. It was 11 o’clock when I finally came back. I left at 8. I figured that he would be up and everything. He says, ‘Haven’t you gone yet?’ and I go ‘Gone? I’ve gone and come back.’ He goes, ‘You couldn’t have,’ and then almost in the same sentence he’s saying, ‘Oh, I woke up a little while ago and somebody was calling your name.’” She stated that he said that a “sort of mechanical, animal-ish” sounding voice called out, ‘Nadine, Nadine. Come up over the hill.’ My brother used to live there. He left because of too many voices and stuff. They really got to him. He said they were really getting mean.” Betty asked how they were getting mean and Nadine said, “He wouldn’t say. He won’t talk about it anymore.”

The real high-strangeness event that topped all of her unusual recollections was when Nadine shared the events from the year before (1976), which she thought was February 18th. It was again at the home in Maine, in Edgecomb. Nadine then began to describe the aliens her brother had seen. “He’s seen five occupants, all different,” she said. “All at the same time. It was the same night when my car lost its brakes. That night was just a series of events. I took my friend John up there and all of a sudden he says, ‘We have to go outside now.’ It was the middle of winter. I said, ‘John, why do we have to go out,’ and he said, ‘Because they’re out there now.’ I said, ‘What do you mean they’re out there now?’ He said, “They’re out there and we have to go out.’ I said, ‘All right,’ you know, like I’ll humor him. I put on my jacket and went outside. All of a sudden he falls, just gets to the porch and he starts falling and cringing, whining and making funny noises. This went on for about half an hour. My brother was outside but he was a little ways away and he saw the occupants and he said, “Look at the light shining on John.” Well, I had John by the shoulders. I kept saying, ‘Why don’t I see them?’ “They’re shining lights,’ Larry said. “There’s light shining down.’ I said, ‘I don’t see it.’”

“During that time it was funny because here was my best friend cringing and crawling on the ground and I thought it was funny. …I really wanted to go somewhere and do something else. I could not have cared less.” Then he came out of it and they got him inside the house. “He went into it again and my mother kept saying, ‘Oh, he’s all right. He’s all right!’ …I kept saying, ‘I’m going to get him out of here. Whatever it is I’m going to get him out of here,’ and my mother said, ‘No, don’t be foolish. There’s no reason to leave. We’re all going to stay here and just relax.’ My brother called me aside and he said, ‘They’ve got control of mom. I don’t want to stay here anymore,’ but he said, ‘I have to stay here to protect her.’” After a half hour again Nadine’s friend John came out of it and Nadine got him to the car. She said that her mother was really getting angry at this point. Nadine continued: “I said, ‘Mom, I’ll be back. I’m just going to take him to a motel and leave him off.’ ‘There’s no reason for anyone to leave here,’ she said. She was really mad, which wasn’t like my mother.”

“She kept saying that there was no reason to leave, that John was going to be fine. ‘Just leave him alone. He’ll be fine,’ and there he is on the ground, in the snow, in the mud, just rolling around, and she’s saying, ‘Oh, he’s fine,’ very calm like it wasn’t bothering her, and it didn’t really bother me either, but I just figured that the thing I should be doing would be getting him out of there. I had to kind of think of what was the right thing to do, not to do what I felt like doing. So I loaded him up in the car and the brakes didn’t work, and it didn’t bother me any. I just kept on going, rather than stopping. Went through lights, went through quite a few stop signs, and heavy intersections too.”

“I forget; every time we came to a stop sign I would forget that the brakes didn’t work. Every time you know. I’d be going about 40 miles an hour and every time. I didn’t learn after 4 or 5 stop signs and finally we came to this cliff and I forgot again. We just went up; the front wheels were over it and another inch they would have been down and over.” I asked how far a drop it would have been and she replied, “Oh, it wasn’t that big a drop. It was probably twice the ceiling? The thing is that it was a busy intersection right down there and I would have gotten run into.”

I asked what time of the day this would have been and Nadine said it was around 10 o’clock at night. “I just got out and laughed and started pointing at the car,” she added. “John was all upset, but anyhow he was out of the traffic so I said, ‘I’m going to drive home now.’ He said, ‘You’re not going in that car.’ He said, “If you take the car you’ll be dead.’ …I said, “Oh, I’m not worried about it.’ I wasn’t, but to make him happy I called my mother who came to pick me up. We went back to my house and it was as if nothing had ever happened. We said ‘Good night’ and we all went to bed.”

I next asked about the “five aliens” that her brother had seen. “Yeah, up over our hill,” Nadine said. “He said that they were all standing there with light behind them. He could see them a little bit.” I asked if he could describe them, and she replied, “Some of them. He described the Bigfoot. He was really big and tall with long grey hair. He was next to some small ones that were kind of white. I don’t know about the other ones. He didn’t like to talk about them and soon after that he left the house too. I made the mistake of asking him a question one day and he gave me hell. He said, ‘You don’t ever talk about that here.’ Then we went for a ride and he said, ‘You know what they do if you do things they don’t like.’”

Growing up Nadine’s mother, she said, kept insisting, “They won’t hurt you. They’re friendly.” Then before her mother moved to California in April 1976, because Nadine had mentioned something about their experiences, her mom this time told her, “You don’t go talking about that because you can get into a lot of trouble.” Surprised to hear this Nadine responded, “You’ve been telling me that they’re friendly,’ to which Nadine says her mom replied, “I didn’t want to scare you.” The following October, Nadine travelled out to California to visit her mother and she said, “We would be talking about it at night and she’d turn completely cold and she’d shiver and she’d say, ‘They don’t want us talking about this anymore.’”

I would later visit the empty family home myself in Edgecomb, located in an isolated location, and spoke with a local federal postal employee who knew Nadine and spoke very highly of her and of her credibility. The last word I got on Nadine was from Betty Hill in early 1989, when she wrote me that Nadine and Steve had married by the pool at Betty’s mother’s home in Kingston, N.H. They were afterwards stationed in Nebraska and then in California for awhile, and then Steve retired and Nadine did not re-enlist. At the time of this letter, Betty said that the couple was living in Virginia and had had one son who had just started school. “Nadine never talks about the things she told in the past,” Betty added.

It’s sort of interesting I think to note the slight similarity of this account to the UFO landing and two Bigfoots reported at Uniontown, Pennsylvania, back on the night of October 25, 1973, in that there was what we might describe as a kind of “possession” element to this and a UFO/Bigfoot connection as well. In the Pennsylvania case, there was a 22-year-old male witness who fired his 30.06 rifle at the Bigfoot creatures. The incident had begun around 9 p.m. with 15 witnesses seeing a UFO descending to the ground. Later local UFO investigators arrived on the scene and as they were walking around in the field where the activity had been reported earlier, around 2 a.m., the young man who had fired at the Bigfoots began acting strangely, rubbing his face and head. He became incommunicative and began moving back and forth in a jerky motion, and fearing that he was about to faint one investigator and the man’s father tried to support him. But then he began breathing deeply, next made a loud growl, pushing the two men to the ground. His own dog started to seemingly attack him but the man acted as though he was going after his dog and it ran off whimpering. The others watched helplessly as he ran around swinging his arms in the air and making growling sounds. At one time, he made what was described as an extremely loud, inhuman type scream. Then eventually he fell face down in the pasture. During all of this, one investigator began to feel faint and appeared to be pale, while another complained of breathing difficulty. Eventually all noticed a strong and sickening sulfur or rotten eggs odor.

Meanwhile the witness was seemingly coming back around, slowly moving a bit and moaning. He began to warn the others that he was aware of a presence and it seemed to be warning them to leave. They did. All of this account is well documented in Stan Gordon’s book Silent Invasion: The Pennsylvania UFO-Bigfoot Casebook (2010) and Dr. Berthold E. Schwarz’s two-volume book UFO Dynamics (1983). In the years following this remarkable incident, I had the opportunity to sit down with both authors in their homes and discuss with them this extraordinary case.


Thursday, March 28, 2024