Concord Monitor file photo Betty and Barney Hill, the Portsmouth couple whose reported encounter with a UFO in 1961, appear with their dog in an undated photo. This weekend marks the 60th anniversary of the incident. (Concord Monitor file photo)

I remember some years ago chatting with former Telegraph reporter Barry Palmer when the subject turned to one of his most memorable assignments: “Go interview that Portsmouth couple that was abducted by aliens.”

Palmer, whose stint over at the then-60 Main St. headquarters of The Nashua Telegraph, our predecessor-in-name, spanned much of the 1960s, recalled in pretty good detail that Nov. 30, 1965 assignment.

He was sent to cover a rare public appearance by Betty and Barney Hill, who four years earlier had become household names across the land for their at once fascinating and terrifying encounter – alleged encounter, that is – with beings of some sort whose ride, an “inverted, disc-like object,” as Hill described it, suddenly showed up in the sky above his car as he and Betty traveled south on Route 3 in the area of Cannon Mountain, headed home to Portsmouth from their honeymoon trip to Canada.

Palmer remembered shoe-horning himself into the jam packed venue – the former Garrison Inn at Amherst Street and Henri Burque Highway – and squeezing out enough space to grab a couple of photos and take notes when the Hills were introduced.

The event was hosted by the Nashua Jaycees, of which former Mayor Bernie Streeter was president at the time.

Courtesy of Bryce Zabel Former investigative reporter Bryce Zabel, who is adapting the story of Betty and Barney Hill for a TV series, said he discovered a couple of inaccuracies in this historical highway marker, installed in Lincoln on the 50th anniversary of the Hills' alleged encounter with a UFO. (Courtesy of Bryce Zabel)

The mysterious series of events that would eventually put the Hills in the national spotlight occurred overnight on Sept. 19-20, 1961, some 60 years ago this weekend.

Betty and Barney have since passed – Barney, in 1969 at age 46, and Betty, in 2004 at 85 – but their story is very much alive, living a busy life among the pages and photo galleries of history.

One thing I forgot to ask Palmer: Why was his Dec. 1, 1965 story the very first one the Telegraph ran on an event that happened more than four years earlier?

True, word of the incident didn’t start emerging for weeks, even months later, even in Portsmouth, where the Hills had been living for several years.

Various accounts tell us that the Hills may, at first, have chosen to keep it to themselves, but, as Bryce Zabel, a writer/producer who is developing a TV series on the Hill case based upon the book “Captured!” tells us, the belief that the Hills “were not public with their story until it was leaked to the Boston Traveler in 1965” is, as Zabel puts it, “well-intentioned, but wrong.”

Dean Shalhoup

Having immersed himself in researching the Hill case after arranging to adapt it for TV, Zabel said he’s “discovered many things about the case.” But perhaps the most interesting, he adds, is his discovery that the state historical marker installed on the 50th anniversary of the incident “contains two fact errors … or, at minimum, two fact distortions.”

Zabel wrote about those in his recent article for his online Medium.com publication “Trail of the Saucers,” which is titled “New Hampshireís Betty & Barney Hill UFO Historical Marker Needs a Rewrite,” available at bit.ly/Hill_UFO_Sign.

Well-researched and very informative, the article is well worth a read, especially if the Hill case, or the subject of UFOs in general, float your boat – or in this case, your flying saucer.

In the article, Zabel, who is producing the TV series with his wife and co-writer Jackie Zabel through their production company, Stellar Productions, examines the two “errors,” or “distortions,” in the highway marker sign, which the state Division of Historical Resources installed along Route 3 in the town of Lincoln 10 years ago.

One of the inaccuracies, he writes, is the “idea that Betty and Barney Hill were not public with their story.”

File photo by The Associated Press This photo of the late Betty Hill, taken by an Associated Press photographer in September 1981, appeared in The Telegraph with a story marking the 20th anniversary of the UFO incident involving Hill and her late husband, Barney Hill. (File photo by The Associated Press)

The other is his determination that “the Boston Traveler (later the Herald Traveler, and now defunct) did not ‘leak’ the story of Betty and Barney Hill,” but only reported it.

Which brings us to the question: When did the Traveler finally decide to break the story?

For the record, according to Zabel, “award-winning investigative reporter John Luttrell broke the story in a legitimate, responsible, and ethical manner,” Zabel wrote, adding that “if any leaks occurred, they came from people offering information and reports to Luttrell.”

Meanwhile, the Traveler broke the story in grand fashion, launching Luttrell’s 5-part series on Oct. 25, 1965, with the headline “A UFO Chiller: Did THEY Seize Couple?”

You can guess what happened next. Yep, UFO enthusiasts, known as “ufologists,” and journalists “from every corner of the Earth” almost instantly besieged the Hills with phone calls and letters.

Who knows how many of them connected with the Hills, but Zabel did mention in his article that when Luttrell’s series hit newsstands, the former newspaper news service United Press International (UPI) began getting requests for the stories from national, as well as international, news outlets.

So great was the interest in the story here in central New England that the Traveler set daily sales records throughout the series – and received more than 3,000 requests for reprints.

And the fact the Hills story sort of languished in the background for more than four years until Luttrell’s story hit newsstands the last week of October helps answer the question I forgot to ask old friend Barry Palmer: Why the Telegraph hadn’t written about the Hills until Palmer’s Nov. 30 story.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears weekly in The Sunday Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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