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THE ZETA RETICULI INCIDENT

By Terence Dickinson with related commentary by: Jeffrey L.
Kretsch, Carl Sagan, Steven Soter, Robert Schaeffer, Marjorie Fish,
David Saunders, and Michael Peck.

(C) 1976 by AstroMedia, Corp., publisher of Astronomy Magazine.

[...]

the experience [Hill abduction] remains a fascinating story despite the
absence of proof that it actually happened. Anyway -- that's where
things were in 1966 when Marjorie Fish, an Ohio schoolteacher, amateur
astronomer and member of Mensa, became involved. She wondered if the
objects shown on the map that Betty Hill allegedly observed inside the
vehicle might represent some actual pattern of celestial objects. To
get more information about the map she decided to visit Betty Hill in
the summer of 1969. (Barney Hill died in early 1969.) Here is Ms.
Fish's account of that meeting:

"On Aug.4, 1969, Betty Hill discussed the star map with me. Betty
explained that she drew the map in 1964 under posthypnotic suggestion.
It was to be drawn only if she could remember it accurately, and she
was not to pay attention to what she was drawing -- which puts it in
the realm of automatic drawing. This is a way of getting at repressed
or forgotten material and can result in unusual accuracy. She made two
erasures showing her conscious mind took control part of the time.

"Betty described the map as three-dimensional, like looking through a
window. The stars were tinted and glowed. The map material was flat and
thin (not a model), and there were no noticeable lenticular lines like
one of our three-dimensional processes. (It sounds very much like a
reflective hologram.) Betty did not shift her position while viewing
it, so we cannot tell if it would give the same three-dimensional view
from all positions or if it would be completely three-dimensional.
Betty estimated the map was approximately three feet wide and two feet
high with the pattern covering most of the map. She was standing about
three feet away from it. She said there were many other stars on the
map but she only (apparently) was able to specifically recall the
prominent ones connected by lines and a small distinctive triangle off
to the left. There was no concentration of stars to indicate the Milky
Way (galactic plane) suggesting that if it represented reality, it
probably only contained local stars. There were no grid lines."

[...]

Now we are ready to return to the map drawn by Betty Hill. Marjorie
Fish reasoned that if the stars in the Hill map corresponded to a
patter of real stars -- perhaps something like we just developed, only
from an alien's viewpoint -- it might be possible to pinpoint the
origin of the alleged space travelers. Assuming the two stars in the
foreground of the Hill map were the "base" stars (the sun, a single
star, was ruled out here), she decided to try to locate the entire
pattern. She theorized that the Hill map contained only local stars
since no concentration would be present if a more distant viewpoint was
assumed and if both "us" and the alien visitors' home base were to be
represented.

Let's assume, just as an astronomical exercise, that the map does
show the sun and the star that is "the sun" to the humanoids. We'll
take the Hill encounter at face value, and see where it leads.

Since the aliens were described as "humanoid" and seemed reasonably
comfortable on this planet, their home planet should be basically like
ours. Their atmosphere must be similar because the Hills breathed
without trouble while inside the ship, and the aliens did not appear to
wear any protective apparatus. And since we assume their biology is
similar to ours, their planet should have the same temperature regime
as Earth (Betty and Barney did say it was uncomfortably cold in the
ship). In essence, then, we assume their home planet must be very
Earthlike. Based on what we discussed earlier it follows that their sun
would be on our list if it were within 55 light-years of us.

The lines on the map, according to Betty Hill, were described by the
alien as "trade routes" or "places visited occasionally" with the
dotted lines as "expeditions". Any interpretation of the Betty Hill map
must retain the logic of these routes (i.e. the lines would link stars
that would be worth visiting).

Keeping all this in mind, Marjorie Fish constructed several three-
dimensional models of the solar neighborhood in hopes of detecting the
pattern in the Hill map. Using beads dangling on threads, she
painstakingly recreated our stellar environment. Between Aug. 1968 and
Feb. 1973, she strung beads, checked data, searched and checked again.
A suspicious alignment, detected in late 1968, turned out to be almost
a perfect match once new data from the detailed 1969 edition of the
Catalog of Nearby Stars became available. (This catalog is often called
the "Gliese catalog" -- pronounced "glee-see" -- after its principal
author, Wilhelm Gliese.)


The 16 stars in the stellar configuration discovered by Marjorie Fish
are compared with the map drawn by Betty Hill in the diagram on page 6.
If some of the star names on the Fish map sound familiar, they should.
Ten of the 16 stars are from the compact group that we selected earlier
based on the most logical direction to pursue to conduct interstellar
exploration from Earth.

Continuing to take the Hill map at face value, the radiating pattern
of "trade routes" implies that Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli are the "hub"
of exploration or, in the context of the incident, the aliens' home
base. The sun is at the end of one of the supposedly regular trade
routes.

The pair of stars that make up Zeta Reticuli is practically in the
midst of the cluster of solar type stars that attracted us while we
were mapping out a logical interstellar voyage. Checking further we
find that all but two of the stars in the Fish pattern are on the table
of nearby solar type stars. These two stars are Tau 1 Eridani (an F6
star) and Gliese 86.1 (K2), and are, respectively, just above and below
the parameters we arrived at earlier. One star that should be there
(Zeta Tucanae) is missing probably because it is behind Zeta 1 Reticuli
at the required viewing angle.

To summarize, then: (1) the pattern discovered by Marjorie Fish has
an uncanny resemblance to the map drawn by Betty Hill; (2) the stars
are mostly the ones that we would visit if we were exploring from Zeta
Reticuli, and (3) the travel patterns generally make sense.

Walter Mitchell, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University in
Columbus, has looked at Marjorie Fish's interpretation of the Betty
Hill map in detail and tells us, "The more I examine it, the more I am
impressed by the astronomy involved in Marjorie Fish's work."

During their examination of the map, Mitchell and some of his
students inserted the positions of hundreds of nearby stars into a
computer and had various space vistas brought up on a cathode ray tube
readout. They requested the computer to put them in a position out
beyond Zeta Reticuli looking toward the sun. From this viewpoint the
map pattern obtained by Marjorie Fish was duplicated with virtually no
variations. Mitchell noted an important and previously unknown fact
first pointed out by Ms. Fish: The stars in the map are almost in a
plane; that is, they fill a wheel shaped volume of space that makes
star hopping from one to another easy and the logical way to go -- and
that is what is implied by the map that Betty Hill allegedly saw.

"I can find no major point of quibble with Marjorie Fish's
interpretation of the Betty Hill map," says David R. Saunders, a
statistics expert at the Industrial Relations Center of the University
of Chicago. By various lines of statistical reasoning he concludes that
the chances of finding a match among 16 stars of a specific spectral
type among the thousand-odd stars nearest the sun is "at least 1,000 to
1 against".

"The odds are about 10,000 to 1 against a random configuration
matching perfectly with Betty Hill's map," Saunders reports. "But the
star group identified by Marjorie Fish isn't quite a perfect match, and
the odds consequently reduce to about 1,000 to 1. That is, there is one
chance in 1,000 that the observed degree of congruence would occur in
the volume of space we are discussing.

"In most fields of investigation where similar statistical methods
are used, that degree of congruence is rather persuasive," concludes
Saunders.

Saunders, who has developed a monumental computerized catalog of more
than 60,000 UFO sightings, tells us that the Hill case is not unique in
its general characteristics -- there are other known cases of alleged
communication with extraterrestrials. But in no other case on record
have maps ever been mentioned.

Cori,
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